Coverity has announced Schneider Electric, one of the world's largest energy management providers, has selected Coverity Static Analysis to automatically find software defects across its automation and control software product portfolio.

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. 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 optimise product quality and reduce development costs. Schneider Electric reports 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.