Innovation in Bug Hunting

"Klocwork, a startup in Ottawa, Canada, is helping to solve a multibillion dollar problem: finding and fixing bugs buried deep in lines of computer code – or exterminating at the source before they strike.

It is a worthy battle. Software defects cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion a year, or about 0.6 percent of its gross domestic product, according to a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Developers already spend about 80 percent of software development costs on identifying and correcting defects."

CTO and Co-founder, Djenana Campara, "moved from Sarajevo to Toronto with her infant daughter in 1998, escaping the war in Bosnia. She had a degree in science, electrical engineering, and computer science from the University of Sarajevo, but didn’t speak a word of English. She sent out handwritten resumes on lined paper and landed a job Toronto technology company Amdahl; later she moved to Nortel Networks. There she developed software to clean code and free up memory, allowing programmers to add new features without the fallout.

The software was so successful at finding and repairing software code that Nortel decided to spin it out as a separate company – Klocwork – in February 2001, after a five-year incubation period."

Web Source: Red Herring, May 25, 2004 (requires free registration)

Klocwork Web Site