PVS-Studio Team Is Impartial When Writing Articles

Aug 07 2018

Author: Andrey Karpov

Our team checks various open source projects using PVS-Studio and writes about the results of the code analysis. From time to time, we come across strange accusations of bias. We think that this is often trolling and entering into a discussion with such people does not make sense. On the other hand, we do not want to leave such comments unanswered either. Therefore, I decided to write a small article so that I could answer people by giving them just one link to it.

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We have written and continue writing articles on checks of various projects. We are doing marketing education. Developers learn useful information and at the same time get acquainted with the PVS-Studio code analyzer. Moreover, by accumulating experience on checks of open source projects, we gather the information that allows making very interesting publications, such as:

Now about the negative reaction. Some articles suddenly cause very critical and even badmouthing comments. There were many of such articles and I do not remember all of them, but here are some:

So many things we are blamed for. Starting with complaints that we wanted to decry achievements of project authors, that a competitor bribed us and that special-order article specifically discredited a project, that we are blackmailers and we write bad articles when a company doesn't buy a license. Generally, we heard a lot of stuff.

I responsibly declare that when writing articles, we are absolutely impartial. We describe what we see. If there are a lot of errors, we write that there are a lot of them. If a project is of high-quality, we write that we could not find errors:

Our goal is to promote the methodology of static analysis as a whole and demonstrate the abilities of PVS-Studio. To do this, one does not need to distort the results. If we did not find any errors in a single project, we will find them in another one. That's all, there is no conspiracy.

Various authors write articles. Articles turn out different. Sometimes we are too enthusiastic, trying to show that no one is immune from bugs and typos. Sometimes articles can contain bad humor. However, we do not want to offend anyone or tarnish. By the way, we did the same publications about ourselves as well.

Our team raises money by selling licenses and selling expertise (audit of the customer's code). Almost the entire code of our clients is closed. Accordingly, it makes no sense to look for the reason why we decided to write about errors in any open project. This project just happened to become the object of research. It does not matter if something was found or not.

By the way, anyone can suggest a project to check. Nevertheless, we do not promise that we will check it in the near future and that we will actually check it. There are too many projects. And yet, especially in the lead-up to any events, we give preference to projects of a certain kind. When we were adapting PVS-Studio for checking embedded applications, it was a rational decision to check RT-Thread IoT OS rather than, for example, a game. Soon we are planning to show PVS-Studio for Java and will obviously switch to open Java projects. Therefore, I am giving a hint. You do not necessarily have to wait until we check your favorite project. You can do this yourself using the trial version.