Unintended acceleration!

The U.S. Department of Transportation released the results of a 10-month National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) NASA investigation (pdf) into potential electronic causes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles. As part of the investigation, NASA experts examined more than 280,000 lines of software. NASA's analysis included performing static analysis on the software using three tools: GrammaTech CodeSonar, Coverity Prevent and Uno (a research tool that originated at Bell Labs).

In the report, NASA described CodeSonar as a "strong static source code analysis tool from GrammaTech that uses a different technology for detailed inter-procedural source code analysis. CodeSonar analysis typically takes longer to complete than comparable tools, but can reveal more subtle types of defects and suspect coding patterns, requiring deeper path analysis (which can be more time consuming)."

Paul Anderson, VP of Engineering for GrammaTech, stated, "GrammaTech is proud that NASA chose our static-analysis tool for this important and demanding investigation. NASA's selection underscores that CodeSonar is the tool of choice for organizations that want to perform the deepest and most penetrating code analysis."