There’s no getting around the fact that software is a crucial part of business today – whether it be for the usual suspects, e.g., high-tech companies or for more traditional, “brick and mortar” companies, such as those focused on automotive and manufacturing, which are increasingly reliant on software for their day-to-day operations. More lines of code are being written and put into production today than at any previous point, and this trend is only expected to rise. So it’s no surprise that software quality is more important for businesses than it has ever been.

Coverity, a development testing company, recently announced the results of its 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source Report. The report, issued annually, analyzed more than 450 million lines of software code. It measured the quality of a variety of software projects (both open source and proprietary) and identified critical bugs and defects that would otherwise adversely affect software if put into production. Read on for more information about the key findings from this year’s report.

About the project: Founded in 2006 in partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the free Coverity Scan™ service is an important resource for the open source development community to improve the quality of its software. In 2012, the service scanned more than 115 open source software projects, and more than 20,000 defects identified by the scan service were fixed by open source developers.