Coverity reveals multithreaded development tool

The tool observes code as it is executed and automatically identifies race conditions and deadlocks. The company say this is unique in the field of dynamic analysis because it "detects not only problems that will occur in limited testing environments, but also problems that have the potential to occur over extended operations in field environments."

Coverity Thread Analyzer can also be used in conjunction with its static analysis tool, Coverity Prevent.

"The continued growth of multicore processors has forced development teams to begin creating multithreaded applications whether they are ready or not," said Michael Monticello, security and risk analyst at analyst group Enterprise Management Associates.

"To successfully eliminate the concurrency defects inherent to multithreaded applications, organizations need sophisticated new tools that pinpoint these hard-to-find issues so developers can focus on bringing secure and reliable new products to market," he added.

This distinction, says Coverity, is particularly important for multithreaded applications that, due to their complexity, may run without failure for extremely long periods of time before a "perfect storm" of system events triggers a concurrency defect.