Neopost, a leading mailing room equipment and logistics systems supplier, is accelerating time to market and product innovation by using Static Analysis from Coverity as its development testing solution. By finding and fixing software defects in the embedded systems integrated in its wide range of professional machines as the code is being written, Neopost says it has shortened its development time by 50 percent and has reduced the business risk of critical software defects entering the field.

Neopost has a permanent focus on product quality, providing clients with innovative and efficient tools and systems that help automate and simplify the management of their business mail, such as folding and inserting equipment, postage meters and envelope address printers. To maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and innovation, Neopost regularly enriches its portfolio of solutions and services. In 2008, Neopost launched a new collection of next-generation devices.

“How a company manages its mail is highly sensitive as it is closely linked to financial matters,” said Patrick Blanluet, head of the Embedded Software Research & Development Department at Neopost France. “A software defect could result in a critical business error, such as incorrectly calculated mailing costs or even postal service stoppages. As a consequence, our products must demonstrate faultless quality, which necessitates rigorous testing of our devices and embedded software.”

Neopost devices include embedded software for the main device as well as peripheral items, such as digital weighing machines. The core software alone equates to more than 500,000 lines of code, the majority of which is heavily reused across products.

“Eighty percent of this core source code is common to all machines in our next-generation product line, the remaining 20 percent being specifically developed for each model,” explained Blanluet. “This repeatable approach enables us to develop the product suite more rapidly. Because software is reused across multiple products, the quality of the code is even more crucial as a lone defect could have ramifications for our entire product portfolio and customer base. It is therefore very important to have an accurate solution for testing code during development as the code is being written.”

In order to guarantee the integrity of the embedded software in its mailroom products, Neopost defined a rigorous internal testing process, including, among other aspects, the analysis of the source code in development.

“With the development of our new range of machines, we made the decision to select a development testing solution that would enable us to improve the discovery and correction of common errors that are not normally detected until the software is in a production environment,” continued Blanluet. “Memory leaks or overrun of an array are just some of the defects that can impact the productivity of the development teams and the overall quality of the products. After a detailed audit and evaluation of the solutions on the market, we selected Coverity.”