Excellent blog post by John Carmack on performing assessments relative to risk management — how to find benefit from static code analysis

It is important to say right up front that quality isn’t everything, and acknowledging it isn’t some sort of moral failing. Value is what you are trying to produce, and quality is only one aspect of it, intermixed with cost, features, and other factors. There have been plenty of hugely successful and highly regarded titles that were filled with bugs and crashed a lot; pursuing a Space Shuttle style code development process for game development would be idiotic. Still, quality does matter.

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I probably would have talked myself into paying Coverity eventually, but while I was still debating it, Microsoft preempted the debate by incorporating their /analyze functionality into the 360 SDK. /Analyze was previously available as part of the top-end, ridiculously expensive version of Visual Studio, but it was now available to every 360 developer at no extra charge. I read into this that Microsoft feels that game quality on the 360 impacts them more than application quality on Windows does. :-)