We got a demo from the Coverity people. We ran their tool on our code base in advance. Via a WebEx session we got an explanation of the results, but first we got an overview of the company and their projects since some of the team were new to this stuff.
It's a pretty young company, founded less than ten years ago, and their aim is to deliver products that improve the quality of your software. Clients are in the medical and aerospace branche. Wikipedia article on Coverity. They have a 1000+ customers.
From the webbased Integrity Center software, several tools can be controlled. One of them is Static Analysis, called the Prevent tool. The tool identifies critical problems, not the more trivial things like style compliance etcetera.
Since bugs are cheaper to fix in development rather than in the field, this gives the user time and cost savings.
The software checks the compiler calls that are made when you do a build (via make) and then works on the code in the same way. It's not a replacement for unit tests. After running, a database of the results is written and there is a web frontend where you can read out the database.
The screen shows a number of defects, with filter options at the left. When clicking on a defect, you can see the code as well as th classification of the defect. Along with the classification, there is a short explanation of this type of issue. Clicking further will also give simple examples so you better understand the defect.
Each defect can be assigned to a certain team member. We have already invested in using Traq so I'm not so sure that's useful.
We had questions about finding concurrency problems. Coverity can help with this but they support pthread it of the box. Since we use QThreads, we should make a model for that library. However since we have the code available (Qt is open souce) and it's using PThreads, it's not a problem and Coverity will be able to pick it up automatically.
Besides the existing checks, it's possible to add your own checks. Perhaps you want to enforce a certain way in which you use an external library.
The software tries to be smart. For example sometimes you do some smart coding which usually triggers an error. Coverity will use heuristics and not report it if the rest of the code base shows that this is not something worth reporting.
We closed off the demo with a discussion on licensing. The account manager teams up with a technical consultant and together they pretty extensively work on the requirements and resulting cost savings. From that, the price is derived. There are other licensing models however.