Coverity, a development testing company, has announced the results of its latest Coverity Scan Project Spotlight, which analysed the LibreOffice open source project, including defect density and the types of defects identified, as compared to the industry average.

LibreOffice is a Document Foundation project, and is the default office suite for most of the popular Linux distributions including Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu, and has the support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), AMD, Google and Intel. It is also available in more than 112 languages and for a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X Tiger and Linux.

LibreOffice has leveraged the free development testing service to scan more than 9 million lines of code, and identified more than 4,700 critical defects. They have fixed more than 2,100 high- and medium-impact defects, including null pointer dereferences, resource leaks and memory corruptions.

The Coverity Scan enables developers to fix defects that can improve the state of open source software quality. The service has analysed over 300 million lines of open source code for more than 700 open source projects.

Jennifer Johnson, chief marketing officer for Coverity said: "With open source software reaching mainstream adoption in commercial software development projects, development testing has become a core part of the open source development process to find and fix critical software defects early. Our Coverity Scan service is experiencing explosive growth within the open source community, and we applaud LibreOffice, along with all of the open source projects that use our free service, for their commitment to creating and delivering high-quality software."