Coverity is announcing its Coverity Prevent 2.3 source code analyzer, which features improvements to identify concurrent programming defects in source code, the company said. An example of such an error would be one that could occur in an account balance access program, in which locks are needed to prevent multiple accesses simultaneously. A developer may forget to write in code to release the lock, thus holding up the data set.

"It's difficult to find concurrency problems in general because you have to depend on, for example, timing of events with respect to each other. That's something that's difficult to produce in the lab," said Andy Chou, CTO and co-founder of Coverity.

The product focuses on three concurrency problems: double locks and missing unlocks, incorrect lock ordering, and blocking operations within critical sections. These errors can lead to severe and unpredictable performance degradation, according to Coverity. A concurrency analyzer in Prevent 2.3 uncovers these issues.

Concurrency is set to become a bigger issue in programming with the advent of dual-core multiprocessors, Coverity said. "As far as concurrency is concerned, the emergence of dual-core processors makes concurrent programming much more prevalent."

Coverity counts as its customers companies such as Oracle and Cisco Systems and organizations such as NASA. But its software particularly can benefit the automotive industry, with manufacturers looking to software for product differentiation but having to avoid conflicts between systems, according to Thilo Koslowski, lead automotive analyst at Gartner.