More than 2 million lines of software code drove NASA’s successful Rover Curiosity landing on Mars. And, for the last two years, every single line was analyzed and scrubbed by static analysis products from Coverity, Grammatech, Semmle, and Uno.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used all of the aforementioned products plus a GCC compiler and a homegrown tool to comb through the software, looking for errors or possible errors.
One of the tricky things about checking all that code — most written in C — is that sometimes it’s hard to know what to look for. “If you put software through three code reviews you’ll find stuff, and then if you put it through a fourth review, you’ll find something else. All these products all have their own strengths,’ said Gerard Holzmann, chief scientist for the JPL Lab for Reliable Software.
via GigaOM
August 20, 2012
