Schneider Electric Selects Coverity for Software Integrity

Schneider Electric provides solutions for customers in a variety of industries, from chemicals to automotive, making energy safe, reliable, efficient and productive from plant to plug. Unity is the largest software development project within Schneider Electric’s Automation and Control division, which automates manufacturing control systems, machine equipment and related applications. Schneider Electric is not only focused on time to market and speed of innovation, but is also concerned with improving quality with every product release. UnityPro is a complex codebase due to the interdependencies within the code and integration with other components in the value chain, putting more pressure on the development team to identify defects before they enter the field and are reported by Schneider’s customers and integration partners.

Schneider Electric first approached Coverity as part of a top-down quality initiative for the Unity product line. As part of the mandate, Schneider Electric examined its existing software development process to identify areas for improvement and tools that can be embedded into the process to help Schneider Electric maximize product quality and reduce support calls while accelerating time to market for new releases. In response, the Unity software development team unanimously selected Coverity Static Analysis for its ease of use, stability and scalability to handle millions of lines of code and analysis accuracy rate.

In use for over three years now, Coverity is used across all development teams in Schneider Electric’s Automation and Control software division to optimize product quality and reduce development costs. Schneider Electric reports that Coverity has directly contributed to a downward trend in the number of support calls while reducing engineering time to fix a critical defect from a minimum of two days to 15 minutes per defect—a savings of 2,520 developer hours which have been re-purposed to innovation projects.

“Coverity Static Analysis enabled Schneider Electric to take control of the integrity of our software and, as a consequence, the quality and safety of our products,” said Frank Klosek, Qualimetry and Senior Technical Manager of Schneider Electric’s End User department. “We recouped the cost of our investment in Coverity within 10 months and continue to see high productivity across the software development teams. Coverity Static Analysis has improved our development process and has freed up our developers to focus on building great software and innovative, high quality products, not fixing bugs.”

Coverity Static Analysis is the industry leading static analysis product. It leverages the most sophisticated, patented analysis techniques for finding and eliminating hard-to-spot, crash-causing defects in software code at the earliest phase of the development lifecycle. Coverity Static Analysis automatically scans complex heterogeneous C/C++, Java and C# code bases with no changes to the code or build system, scaling to any size code base in a single analysis. Coverity Static Analysis’ intuitive interface makes it easy for developers to quickly find the defects they own, zoom in instantly on the priority defects that matter and save resolution time through state of the art defect triage—increasing productivity and reducing the risk of costly product quality issues.

“Schneider is a great example of what happens when top leadership make software integrity a core company value,” said Dave Peterson, Chief Marketing Officer, Coverity. “Unlike recent examples in the news where a software failure has led to massive product recalls and damaged reputations, Schneider Electric has demonstrated its commitment to achieving the highest levels of product quality by implementing static code analysis, while realizing tangible development productivity benefits.”