Case Study: Motorola achieves measurable productivity and quality improvements with Klocwork static analysis

Large scale deployment of static analysis leads to measureable productivity and quality improvements

Motorola’s iDEN Mobile Devices group, a global division of about 1,000 engineers, faced rising code size and complexity, extensive third‑party integration, shrinking development cycles and intense time‑to‑market pressure. The team set a corporate goal to cut external software failures threefold and needed a way to detect defects earlier and measure software quality across distributed development sites.

They deployed Klocwork static analysis (starting Sept 2004), integrated it into the build environment, trained engineers on-site and rolled it out to remote sites in Asia, Australia and Israel so it was used on 100% of products. The program delivered measurable gains: 2× fewer customer‑reported defects at alpha/beta, 3× improvement in Customer Reported Unique Defects, a 1.6× reduction in defect leakage at the code phase, 2× fewer system‑test defects, a 1.2× reduction in non‑traditional CoPQ, and recognition with Motorola’s CEO Quality Award; Motorola subsequently adopted an enterprise license.

Motorola

Faridah Gozleveli

Science Advisory Board Associate, Motorola