Government Technology

Open Source Developers Eliminate Bugs Quickly


April 6, 2006 By

Developers fixed a defect every six minutes in the first week following a published analysis exposing bugs in open source software, according to Coverity. The analysis arose from a contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to improve the security and quality of many open source projects.

In seven days, the defect density for 32 open source projects analyzed dropped from 0.434 defects per thousand lines of code to 0.371 defects. Samba, a widely used open source project used to connect Linux and Windows networks, showed the fastest developer response, reducing software defects in Samba from 216 to 18 in the first seven days.

"My impression is that the open source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate," said Ben Chelf, CTO of Coverity.

In the first seven days, more than 200 open source developers registered to gain secure access to the online defect database and used the information to resolve more than 900 defects. This is an average of more than 5 bug fixes an hour.

Data from Coverity's press release.

Related story:

Open Source Quality Check Completed By Government Funded Research

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