Coverity Static Reviews

We write thousands of lines of code on a daily basis, and we cannot say that our code is free because there are a lot of other developers contributing to the source code and things like that. And this process is prone to human error, defects in the source code, etc.

To automate detection, we use Coverity's static analysis, which has a low false-positive ratio. That's because Coverity's analysis engine includes 20-plus patented technologies. A lot of other static analysis tools use pattern-based analysis, but Coverity's is flow based. That's why we ended up using it. Coverity is helping us identify some of the critical defects at the early stages of the development life cycle. So overall, it is giving us a greater ROI and making our application more mature and robust.

One of the most valuable features is Contributing Events. That particular feature helps the developer understand the root cause of a defect. So you can locate the starting point of the defect and figure out exactly how it is being exploited. So contributing Events lets you create that kind of a workflow. 

We also need a tool that works in an environment that isn't dependent on the built environment. You point it to a folder. Then the tool picks it up, runs the scan, and gives you the report. That feature is available in Coverity. So you don't have to rely upon build artifacts or developer artifacts. So these are the two key features we use daily, and we've gotten good results. 

Coverity's UI is the one thing that needs improvement. Technically speaking, it's doing an outstanding job otherwise. Also, they could reduce their executable size. Right now, the Coverity executable is around 1.2GB to download. If they can reduce it to approximately 600 or 700MB, that would be great. If they decrease the executable, it will be much easier to work in an environment like Docker.

I've been using it for the past two years.

This product has been in the industry for more than 30 years, so it's pretty robust.

Coverity has a decent SLA. The moment you purchase the tool, you also get an SLA agreement with all the email support. They have email support, call support, as well as WebEx and Zoom sessions on demand. Of course, that depends on the nature of the technical issue. If it's simple, it can be resolved with a couple of email exchanges, but if it really needs some attention, they're happy to get on a call. They've even delivered some custom patches as well. 

I used CodeSonar a few years back. Both tools have their advantages. In any static analysis tool, the first stage is the instrumentation of the source code. It'll try to capture the skeleton of your source code. So when I compare them based on the first phase alone, Coverity is far better than CodeSonar. 

They both use a similar technique, but CodeSonar uses up way more storage resources. For example, to scan a 1GB code base, CodeSonar generates more than 5GB of instrumented files for every 1GB of code base. In total, that is 6GB. Coverity generates 500MB extra on top of 1GB, so that equals 1.5GB all in. That's a huge difference. CodeStar would eat up my disc space and hardware resources when I used it, whereas Coverity is minimal. 

In terms of checkers, both CodeSonar and Coverity cover a good length and breadth, especially for C and C++ programming languages. But CodeSonar focuses only on four languages—C, C++, Java, and C#—only four programming languages, whereas Coverity supports more than 20-plus programming languages.

Also, the two are comparable with respect to their plugin offerings, but there are crucial differences. For example, CodeSonar only focuses on well-known integrations, like Jenkins and JIRA, but you cannot expect all customers to use the same tools. Coverity supports almost all CI/CD tools, including Jenkins and Bamboo. It also integrates with service providers like Azure DevOps Pipelines, AWS CodePipelines that CodeSonar hasn't added yet. The plugins are available in the marketplace, and you don't have to pay extra. You just have to download it from the marketplace, hook the plugin in your pipeline, and ready to use kind of approach. So these are some of the major use cases, three major use cases I would say when you compare apples to apples with CodeSonar and Coverity.

Setting up Coverity is pretty simple. It comes with a normal executable. You just double click, follow the wizard, and complete the setup. It also have on screen instructions as well, which makes it pretty easy and cool. Deployment is a much broader question. It depends on how many projects you are trying to scan using Coverity and whether you are integrating this static analysis solution with your CI/CD setup, ID, bug tracking, etc. That all factors in to the total deployment time. So if we're talking about overall deployment, including bug tracking, integration, email notification, CI/CD integration, and everything, it took us 15 to 20 days to onboard 600 projects with 20 users, including all integration.

We don't have a lot of maintenance. There is a major release every quarter, and we get information on new upgrades, patches, and things like that. And we do have the option to not upgrade. The maintenance is mostly covered by the vendor itself, meaning they deliver the patches and upgrades on time. So I don't see that as a hurdle right now. It's been taken care of.

I'm not sure about the licensing. My commercial team deals with that.

I rate Coverity nine out of 10. It's a good choice. If you plan to use Coverity, you should read through the manual to really understand its settings. You have to tune the Coverity engine to get the best research and scalability out of it. A Coverity recently added some smart features that automatically compute the hardware requirements in your current machine. It automatically scales up. For example, it can detect how much multi-core CPU power it needs to run an analysis and how much memory is required, so it makes resources available for other applications running on the same machine. That intelligence has been built on. So initially, I recommend going over the fundamentals and fine-tuning it based on one's own requirements.

Our company has 500 developers and engineers who the solution for C/C++ core static analysis. One engineer handles all ongoing maintenance. 

The solution effectively identifies bugs in code. 

The solution is a bit complex to use in comparison to other products that have many plugins.

More features could be included for finding bugs and analyzing code. For example, more information could be included to explain errors such as memory leaks. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is helpful and responsive. 

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I have not used another solution. 

I would recommend the solution if it includes more features. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I am the administrator and I use this solution to do the calibrating and security scanning of the code in my bank. We are trying to find any vulnerabilities in our code and we are integrating the process with our DevOps.

The most valuable feature is the ability to find vulnerabilities in our code.

I would like to see integration with popular IDEs, such as Eclipse. If Coverity were available as a plugin then developers could use it to find security issues while they are coding because right now, as we are using Coverity, it is a reactive way of finding vulnerabilities. We need to find these kinds of problems during the coding phase, rather than waiting for the code to be analyzed after it is written.

I have been working with Coverity for about eight months.

Coverity is quite stable and we haven’t had any issues or any downtime.

We did not have to scale drastically on any of our applications, so it would be difficult for me to judge how scalable it is. Because of the price, we only purchased 20 licenses. We do plan on scaling the number of users and increasing our usage.

The technical support is quite responsive and most of the time, we received a response really quickly. We have not had any timeline-related issues with them.

We did not use another solution before Coverty, although in my previous company, I used Veracode.

We also use SonarQube for code analysis.

Compared to SonarQube, Coverity finds more vulnerabilities. SonarQube is stronger on core quality, such as duplicate lines of code, but the security issues are found by Coverity.

SonarQube is available as a plugin for development environments such as Eclipse, which allows us to find vulnerabilities proactively.

SonarQube was easier to deploy and I did not require assistance from the vendor for installation or configuration.

We found that during installation and configuration, it takes pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment. It was a bit challenging because the necessary base integration was not easy to configure.

It took us slightly over a week to deploy, whereas, with SonarQube, we were able to complete it in less than a day. It was due to complexities in Coverity that it took us more than a week. The complexities were related to missing API features and hooks.

I had assistance from the vendor, Synopsys, during the deployment.

Coverity is quite expensive. Generally, for security scanning products, the pricing is very expensive. Some solutions have pricing that is based on the number of millions of lines of code, but Coverity is priced based on the number of users.

I believe that pricing based on the number of lines of codes is cheaper than billing on a per-user basis. If we have 400 or 500 developers and each needs a license then it will be cheaper to have a solution where the cost depends on the size of the code.

We also purchased Black Duck Binary Analysis and the Black Duck Hub from Synopsys.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to try to best capture security issues while the code is being written, rather than waiting until it is compiling. It’s easier and much more cost-effective to find vulnerabilities at the earlier, code-writing stage.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you should not rely on one approach to code security. You need to make sure that binary security is also in place, which is not done using Coverity. Any company that wants to secure its environment will need multiple levels of security scanning, and only one of these is handled by Coverity. The second one, binary scanning, can be done by using Black Duck or Veracode. This continues onto other security concerns, such as network scanning.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The product has deeper scanning capabilities. 

The tool needs to improve its reporting. 

I have been working with the product for one and a half years. 

The product's stability is good. 

The product is scalable since it can integrate CI/CD tools. My company has 10 users for the product. 

The solution's support is fast. 

Positive

The solution's setup is easy. 

The tool's price is somewhere in the middle. It's neither cheap nor expensive. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten. 

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We use the solution to scan the static code and identify vulnerabilities. We can verify the rules and scripting during various applications' implementation processes.

The solution has a low false positive rate compared to other vendors. Also, it can scan complex codes. In addition, it has the best features for trial analysis, integration, and language support.

Sometimes, vulnerabilities are not identified even after setting up the automated scanning rules. They should include a feature combining automated scanning tools with manual code reviews for better output.

I have been using the solution for five years.

I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. We can quickly scan around 100 DLS using it. I rate its scalability a nine.

I interact with the solution's technical support team in terms of tuning the tool and improvements. They acknowledge the emails and respond to them quickly.

Positive

The solution integrates well with different tools. Thus, its setup process is relatively straightforward.

The solution is affordable. I rate its pricing a six out of ten.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it a ten.

I use the solution for static analysis.

The product has good API documentation. I’m quite happy with it. The product is easy to use.

Sometimes it's a bit hard to figure out how to use the product’s UI.

I have been using the solution for some years.

I have not faced any issues with the product’s stability.

The solution is scalable. Four people in my organization use the solution.

The initial setup is easy.

I am using the latest version of the product. I have also used Clang Static Analyzer. People planning to use the solution should try the open-source version first to understand how it works. We must have the paid version of the product to get all the resources and documentation. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to scan our products. We've integrated with our build system and it automatically completes the scanning.

The ability to scan code gives us details of existing and potential vulnerabilities. What really matters for us is to ensure that we are able to catch vulnerabilities ahead of time.

When I put my code into Coverity for scanning, the code information of the product is in the system. The solution could be improved by providing a SBOM, a software bill of material. They could also integrate a software composition analysis scan. This would make my job a bit easier.

There is scope for Coverity to look beyond static analysis. Most of people that I have spoken to use Coverity from a pure static analysis perspective. However, we also need to be able to view dynamic pages and APIs using dynamic scanning and SES scans. Currently we would need to use another solution to be able to do this. 

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution.

From a support perspective, they are pretty responsive. I would rate them a five out of five. 

The the last ten years, our company has derived value from using this solution. We continuously evaluate our tech stack and if a better solution came along, we would consider it if it provided more value. 

This is a pretty expensive solution. The overall value of the solution could be improved if the price was reduced. Licensing is done on an annual basis. 

There are other new tools like Veracode, Java Icon and Javascript which are better than Coverity when it comes to visualization. Their cost is significantly lower compared to Synopsys. 

Coverity is really good with CC+ and legacy technologies. However, there are other products that are probably as good or even better than Coverity when it comes to Java or cloud applications. 

If someone were to ask me what tool I would recommend, my answer would depend on what technology they're using and what their use case is. My advice would be based on how they're going to use the product and what they're expecting from the tool.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We are using GK and the latest version for port deployment.

I have been using Coverity for three and a half years.

Coverity is not stable but it is sufficient for our organization's requirements.

Coverity is scalable.

We contacted technical support to help us clean up an issue we had.

If they have a cluster structure, then definitely they should use Coverity. I would rate Coverity a nine out of ten.