Enabling and disabling checkers

Coverity Analysis runs checkers that are enabled and are covered by your license. Many Coverity checkers are enabled by default, so they will run unless you explicitly disable them. Other checkers are disabled by default, and will not run unless explicitly enabled.

Coverity Analysis allows you to enable or disable any checker. Default enablement often varies by programming language, so a checker that supports multiple languages might be enabled by default for one language but disabled by default for another. You can explicitly enable a checker for all languages to which it applies, or you can disable the checker entirely. (Specifying exactly which checkers to run for a particular language is only possible with separate analysis by language.)

The decision to disable or enable a checker or checker group depends on the types of issues that your organization wants Coverity Analysis to detect. It might also depend on Coverity Analysis performance requirements, because the greater the variety of checkers that you run, the longer it can take for Coverity Analysis to complete the analysis.

Remember: When Sigma is enabled, analysis results may include defects associated with security checkers that are documented as disabled by default in the Coverity Checker Reference. See Interaction with Coverity checkers enablement for more details.

Remember: In addition to enabling and disabling checkers, you can use checker options to tune the analysis. For example, to improve the value of NULL_RETURNS defects to your organization, you might raise or lower the threshold used by that checker. To specify checker option values, you use the option --checker-option to the cov-analyze command. For details, see the Coverity Checker Reference.

In this section: