Coverity Reviews

We use Coverity because we have a SonarQube server and we have a lot of software components that use different languages, such as Java, C, C++, and above. For C and C++ components we use Coverity.

The most valuable feature of Coverity is the wrapper. We use the wrapper to build the C++ component, then we use the other code analysis to analyze the code to the build object, and then send back the result to the SonarQube server. Additionally, it is a powerful capabilities solution.

Coverity could improve the ease of use. Sometimes things become difficult and you need to follow the guides from the website but the guides could be better.

I have been using Coverity for approximately four years.

Coverity is stable.

The scalability of Coverity is good. We have more than around 15 software components and other components involved.

We have 20 developers that are using the solution in my organization.

We had support from Coverity for the first six months of usage but later we did not.

I rate the support from Coverity a four out of five.

We have used other solutions, such as SonarQube.

In the beginning, it takes two weeks to learn how to set up Coverity, but later the maintenance work is very easy. The beginning involves soft code, that we need to set up before using SonarQube, we have created SonarQube property itself for every component and inside we need to copy different options for Coverity. We had global Coverity roles or vendors we had to allow it to work with global rules and according to the component itself and the setup. The full implementation process can take approximately one month to complete.

We have two teams to set up the server and install Coverity. I set up the project in Coverity and the different roles in the soft code. The developers use Coverity in their daily work.

My advice to other is the first few steps of using Coverity takes time. It's better to have an experienced user to support it. For new users, it will be hard for them to set it up. If they can get someone to support it directly at the beginning it would be better because for me it's very hard at the beginning for a few weeks.

And on a scale from one to 10, how would you rate Coverity?

I rate Coverity an eight out of ten.

We use the product only as a solution for defect code, to find more build liabilities in the code.

The product allows us to find vulnerabilities while testing our apps. 

The app analysis is the most valuable feature as I know other solutions don't have that.

It's a good tool. The interface, support, pricing, and integration do not have any limitations.

The solution could use more rules. For example, if I have a lot of rules in many languages, it helps my company as having access to more rules works for us.

We'd like a bit more integration.

I've been using the solution for maybe three months. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance has been good overall. 

We find the solution to be scalable. 

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using the product.

I can't say if we have plans to increase usage or not in the future. 

We haven't had any issues with technical support. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We also use SonarQube.

In the past, I used Checkmarx and Fortify, and Coverity had the better price.

I have access only to the interface part and I didn't do the configuration of the tool. I do not handle the initial setup of the product.

As I recall, the deployment itself only took days. 

Our company managed the setup in-house without the help of outside vendors. 

We find the pricing to be reasonable.

We're a customer and end-user.

We are using a recent version of the solution. 

I'd like potential new users to be aware that it's a good tool to implement basic code.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I like Coverity's capability to scan codes once we push it. We don't need more time to review our colleagues' codes. Its UI is pretty straightforward. 

The product should include more customization options. The analytics is not as deep as compared to SonarQube. 

I have been using the product for one month. 

I would rate Coverity's stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has three users for the tool. 

I would rate the tool's setup a seven out of ten. The deployment gets completed in a couple of minutes. 

I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten. 

Coverity's documentation is pretty straightforward and I would rate it a seven out of ten. The solution is cheap and provides us with a dedicated server. 

We use Coverity for static analysis of our code.

Coverity is far from perfection, and I'm not 100 percent sure it's helping me find what I need to find in my role. We need exactly what we are looking for, i.e. security errors and vulnerabilities. It doesn't seem to be reporting while we are changing our code. So either we are perfect, or the tool is missing something. 

I've been using Coverity for a couple of years.

I haven't had much experience trying to scale up Coverity. Only three people at our company work with it.

I encountered a bug with Coverity, and I opened a ticket. Support provided me with a workaround. So it's working at the moment, or at least it seems to be. They are on par with other tech support in terms of knowledge. However, their style of communication could use some improvement.

Setting up Coverity is highly complex. The upgrade procedure is also pretty tough. We've had trouble with it on at least one occasion. When I went ahead with it, it destroyed the installation. I couldn't go back. So it's challenging to understand from the documentation. It seems like they tried to cover all possible topics in their manuals, so they ended up scratching the surface of everything in the world except for the particular practical items that I needed.

Coverity is very expensive.

I rate Coverity five out of 10, but it's tough for me to judge because we decided to purchase it based on one requirement that no other static analysis tool could satisfy. For that reason, we haven't tried anything else. So, let's make an analogy. Let's say I used Sony TVs my entire life, and someone comes up and says, "Hey, there is a new brand of TVs. What do you think of them? Do you think they are good?" How would I know? By comparison, SonarQube seems to be more feature-rich for a standard programming language, and it works with more continuous integration tools.

I am a consultant and I work to bring solutions to different companies. Static code analysis is one of the things that I assist people with, and Coverity is one of the tools that I use for doing that.

I worked with Coverity when doing a couple of different PoCs. For these, I get a few different teams of developers together and we want to decide what makes the most sense for each team as far as scanning technologies. So, part of that is what languages are supported, part of that is how extensible it is, and part of that extensibility is do the developers have time to actually create custom roles?

We also want to know things like what the professional are services like, and do people typically need many hours of professional services to get the system spun up. Other factors include whether it deployed on-premises or in the cloud, and also, which of those environments it can operate with.

One of the things is there's not really a shining star out of all of these tools. SaaS tools have been getting more mature in the past decade, particularly in how fast they run, but also in the results they get. Of course, framework and language additions that increase the capability with results are considered.

The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at.

It should be easier to specify your own validation routines and sanitation routines.

For example, if you have data coming into the application, perhaps something really simple like it's getting a parameter from a web page that is your username when you go to a website to login, and then ultimately that's being consumed by something, the data goes through some business logic and then, let's say, it enters that username into a database. 

Well, what if I say my username is JavaScript calling alert hello. Now I've just entered JavaScript code as my username and you should be able to sanitize that pretty easily with a number of different techniques to remove the actual executable code from what they entered on the login page. However, once you do that, you want the program to understand that you are doing it and then remove what looks like a true positive at first glance because, in fact, the data being consumed in the SQL exec statement is not unsanitized. It's not just coming from the web.

Likewise, let's say you log in, and then it says, "Hello" Such and such. You can inject JavaScript code there and have it be executed when it says hello. So basically the ability to say that this validates and then also above and beyond that, this validates data coming from any GET parameter on the web. You should be able to specify a particular routine validates all of that, or this particular routine validates anytime we read data from a database, maybe an untrusted database.

So, if I reach for that data eight times and I say, "Hey," this validates it once, I also get the option to say it validates it the other seven times, or I could just say it's a universal validator. Obviously, a God validator so to speak is not a good practice because you're sure to miss some edge cases, but to have one routine validate three or four different occurrences is not rare and is often not a bad practice.

Another thing that Coverity needs to implement or improve is a graphical way to display the data. If you can see an actual graphical view of the data coming in, then it would be very useful. Let's say, the first node would be GET parameter from a webpage, and then it would be an arrow to another method like validate user ID, and then another method of GET data about the user. Next, that goes into the database, and so forth. When that's graphically displayed, then it is helpful for developers because they can better grab onto it.

The speed of Coverity can be improved, although that is true for any similar product.

It never crashed so stability has not been an issue.

I have never used it for more than four relatively small to medium-sized projects at a time, so I've never needed to scale it.

I have dealt with sales engineering, rather than technical support. They would sometimes provide a liaison to tech support if they didn't know the answer, but really, they guided us through the proof of concept and they knew that they were under a competitive evaluation against the other tools. They were able to resolve any issues that we came across and got us up and running fairly quickly, as far as I recall.

Coverity is on the good side when it comes to setting it up. I think that it is pretty straightforward to get up and running.

We implement Coverity on our own, with guidance from Coverity.

The price is competitive with other solutions.

In addition to Coverity, I have experience with Checkmarx, Fortify, Veracode, and HCL AppScan, which was previously known as IBM AppScan.

Checkmarx is probably the most extensible and customizable of these products, and you're able to use the C# language to do so, which a lot of developers are familiar with.

HCL AppScan is another tool that has customization capabilities. They are not as powerful but they are easier to implement because you don't need to write any code.

I cannot give an endorsement for any particular one. They all have their merits and it just depends on the requirements. Generally, however, all of these tools are getting better.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to first look around your organization to see if it has already been implemented in another group. If you're a big organization then Coverity or a similar tool may already be in use. In cases like this, I would say that it is best to adopt the same tool because your organization has already gone down that path and there are no huge differences in the capabilities of these tools. Some of them do it in different ways and some do things that others don't, but you won't have the initial bump of the learning curve and you can leverage their experience.

I would rate this solution a seven 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. 

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.