Articles About Code Review

24July

Technical Analysis Contributes to Unexpected Verdict in FilmOn Case

By Quandary Peak Research

Video streaming company FilmOn won a surprising victory in federal District Court this month in a case in which Dr. Sigurd Meldal, a computer scientist at Quandary Peak Research, provided expert witness testimony related to FilmOn’s video streaming servers. Other Quandary Peak consultants were also retained through FilmOn’s counsel, Baker Marquart LLP, to provide technical analysis of source code and databases. The consolidated case, Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FilmOn X, LLC and NBCUniversal Media, LLC v. FilmOn X, LLC, isn’t over, however, as the plaintiffs have vowed to appeal.

The court’s decision establishes that FilmOn is entitled to license to over-the-air broadcast content as a cable company. U.S. District Court Judge George W. Wu ruled that if FilmOn meets certain requirements, it has a right to a compulsory license of broadcast content under Section 111 of the Copyright Act. In arriving at his conclusions, Judge Wu considered whether and how FilmOn operates a system that receives video signals, reformats those signals, and distributes them to users.

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3February

Measuring Software Maintainability

By Nupul Kukreja

Software maintenance costs result from modifying your application to either support new use cases or update existing ones, along with the continual bug fixing after deployment. As much as 70-80% of the Total Ownership Cost (TCO) of the software can be attributed to maintenance costs alone!

Software maintenance activities can be classified as [1]:

Corrective maintenance – costs due to modifying software to correct issues discovered after initial deployment (generally 20% of software maintenance costs)
Adaptive maintenance – costs due to modifying a software solution to allow it to remain effective in a changing business environment (25% of software maintenance costs)
Perfective maintenance – costs due to improving or enhancing a software solution to improve overall performance (generally 5% of software maintenance costs)
Enhancements – costs due to continuing innovations (generally 50% or more of software maintenance costs)

Since maintenance costs eclipse other software engineering activities by large amount, it is imperative to answer the following question:

How maintainable is my application/source-code, really?

The answer to this question is non-trivial and requires further understanding of what does it mean for an application to be maintainable? Measuring software maintainability is non-trivial as there is no single metric to state if one application is more maintainable than the other and there is no single tool that can analyze your code repository and provide you with an accurate answer either. There is no substitute for a human reviewer, but even humans can’t analyze the entire code repositories to give a definitive answer. Some amount of automation is necessary.

So, how can you measure the maintainability of your application? To answer this question let’s dissect the definition of maintainability further. Imagine you have access to the source code of two applications – A and B. Let’s say you also have the super human ability to compare both of them in a small […]

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14July

Quandary Peak Client ROY-G-BIV Successfully Defends Patents in Inter Partes Review (IPR)

By Quandary Peak Research

Brad Ulrich, a software expert at Quandary Peak Research, recently provided source code review in the matter of ROY-G-BIV Corp. vs. ABB, Inc. et al., a patent infringement action relating to technology for hardware-independent motion control software. Mr. Ulrich is representing the plaintiff, ROY-G-BIV Corporation, in Civil Action No. 6:11-CV-622 being litigated in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Mr. Ulrich provides software consulting and expert testimony for clients involved in litigation, and has expertise in numerous software-intensive industries (such as medical devices, smartphones, and embedded controllers) and programming languages (such as C++, Java, SQL, and many others).

An inter partes review (IPR) of the patents at issue in the case recently made news by becoming the first instance in which all claims of a challenged patent have survived intact since the IPR procedure was created as part of the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011. The ROY-G-BIV patents, which date back to 1995, are No. 6,516,236 and 8,073,557. While the nascent Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has ruled on some 30 sets of claims to date in IPRs, this is the first time that the Board upheld the patentability of all challenged claims.

The Board determined in two related proceedings that all of the challenged claims in ROY-G-BIV’s patents should be upheld. In IPR2013-00062 and IPR2013-00282, the court ruled that the petitioner failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 1-10 of U.S. Patent No. 6,516,236 B1 are unpatentable. In the review, […]

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8February

Quandary Peak Assists in Nokia v. HTC Patent Litigation

By Quandary Peak Research

Nokia’s recent settlement with HTC over smartphone patents was widely reported in the media on Friday, resulting in the dismissal of all pending patent litigation worldwide between the two companies. Industry observers widely cited the outcome as an important step for Nokia in its effort to generate royalties from its patent portfolio.

Right up until the settlement was finalized, several of our software experts here at Quandary Peak were working earnestly with the attorneys at Desmarais LLP on behalf of Nokia. Nenad Medvidovic, George Edwards, and Brad Ulrich were all down in the trenches, performing the painstaking work of documenting the technical evidence related to the patents-in-suit in the matters before the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patents disclosed inventions related to receiving push messages, downloading and installing apps over the network, video compression and encoding, protecting sensitive device configuration data, Bluetooth connectivity, calendar data management, and other technologies. The analysis by Quandary Peak included C++ source code review and Java source code review.

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17September

Edwards Tapped to Testify on GPS, Navigation, and Mapping Patents

By Quandary Peak Research

Dr. George Edwards, Quandary Peak’s resident guru of location-based mobile services, has been asked to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent for “Method and System for Providing an Image Vector-Based Traffic Information.” The case, Porto Technology, Co., Ltd. et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, was filed Sept. 20, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Claim 1 of the patent at issue in the case, US Patent 6,233,518, discloses a method of providing an image-based traffic information in a region having at least one time-variant real entity. The method includes forming a traffic state map, transmitting the traffic state map to a user device, and displaying an image in accordance with the traffic state map on a screen of the user device. The patent was filed in 1999 by Heung-Soo Lee and was granted in 2001.

Edwards was engaged by plaintiff’s counsel Fox Rothschild, LLP, a national law firm with over five hundred attorneys. Edwards expects to draw on his knowledge, skills, and training in a variety of mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Qualcomm Brew, Palm Web OS, and RIM BlackBerry OS. Edwards’ conclusions will be based on a technical analysis of C++ and Java source code.

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21August

Protective Orders for Computer Source Code

By Brad Ulrich

Proprietary software source code produced as evidence during discovery is typically afforded stronger protection than other types of evidence. The restrictions on how the source code may be stored, transmitted, and viewed are specified by a protective order (PO). Perhaps in an effort to control costs, many attorneys wait until after the PO has been finalized to retain software analysts and expert witnesses. However, by engaging the experts before the protective order is finalized, counsel can receive important advice on how to negotiate terms that are most advantageous for each particular review, and end up saving time and money in the long run.

Each code review has its own unique set of variables that can vary widely from project to project, including the people involved, time and resource constraints, and software systems and devices. An expert’s job is to take into account the various technical and logistical considerations and suggest terms for a protective order that are advantageous and allow the team to meet the specific goals of the project. The expert can help attorneys pick their battles appropriately — for example, by pointing out that it would be worth accepting more stringent page limits on printed code in exchange for receiving printed code electronically in the form of searchable PDFs.

While there are many variables that will be unknown until the reviewer has a chance to see the code, the analyst should ideally have a strong technical background and experience with both the software systems involved and the source code review process in general such that they can make educated guesses.

Project Variables to Consider when Negotiating a Protective Order

In preparing to recommend terms for a protective order, an analyst should consider at least the following variables:

1. Software systems on […]

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7August

Code Review of Android and Windows Devices Completed

By Quandary Peak Research

Software consultants at Quandary Peak recently completed an lengthy, in-depth source code review of twenty-nine mobile devices running the Android, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. The consultants, George Edwards and Brad Ulrich, drew on their many years of experience in smartphone application development and mobile systems research to document the structure and behavior of the software components at issue. Both Brad and George have worked on a number of cases as an Android expert witness.

The extensive analysis effort was conducted on behalf of Desmarais LLP in connection with a patent infringement matter, MobileMedia Ideas LLC v. HTC Corporation and HTC America Inc. The case initially involved eleven patents for smartphone technology related to voice dialing, call handling, contacts management, media playback and streaming, and image processing. The patents asserted by MMI were U.S. Patents 5,490,170, 5,841,979, 5,915,239, 5,977,887, 6,043,760, 6,049,796, 6,070,068, 6,253,075, 6,427,078, 6,871,048, and 7,349,012.

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24July

Edwards Provides Deposition Testimony in Internet Patent Case

By Quandary Peak Research

George Edwards, one of Quandary Peak’s computer and software experts, was deposed in a patent case on July 17, 2013. Edwards testified with respect to the alleged infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,804,660, titled “System, Method, and Article of Manufacture for Internet Based Affiliate Pooling.” The ‘660 patent was filed in 2001 and lists Michael Landau and Evan Horowitz as inventors.

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8July

Quandary Peak Experts Analyze Android Camera Architecture

By Quandary Peak Research

George Edwards and Nenad Medvidovic, two software experts affiliated with Quandary Peak Research, recently completed a comprehensive examination of the camera software architecture of over a dozen Android devices. The two also analyzed a handful of mobile phones powered by Qualcomm’s Brew platform. The inspection and analysis of C++ and Java source code was an immense task and was central to the technical arguments in the case.

George and Neno performed the source code review, which extended over a period of several months, on behalf of Chinese mobile device manufacturer ZTE, and ZTE’s counsel, Goodwin Procter. ZTE, along with Huawei, Pantech, and HTC, is under investigation by the International Trade Commission (ITC) as a result of patent infringement allegations filed by FlashPoint Technology. Neno was deposed as an Android expert witness and testified at the trial.

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1July

Utilizing a Source Code Analyst in Software Patent Infringement Suits: Finding and Selecting the Right Analyst

By Brad Ulrich

Welcome to the first segment in this series articles on Utilizing a Source Code Analyst in Software Patent Infringement Suits. In my role as both a source code analyst and software expert witness, I have worked closely with top IP firms and Fortune 500 companies to uncover critical source code evidence in software dispute and patent infringement cases. In this series, I discuss the essential steps required for an attorney to engage and best-utilize a source code analyst in a patent infringement case – covering various pitfalls and offering solutions to common problems along the way.

We approach the series in chronological order, starting with basic topics such as: benefits of hiring a source code analyst, what to look for in an analyst, and how to go about finding a good analyst for your case. Future articles will delve further into other key areas including: essential steps in engaging an analyst, proper preparation for a code review, documenting findings for your case, essential communication with your analyst, and how to prepare optimal code cites for expert reports.

Let’s get started!

Benefits of Hiring a Source Code Analyst for Litigation

There are several good reasons to engage a dedicated analyst for review of source code in a patent infringement case. I will cover a few of these briefly here, but for an in-depth discussion of why you should consider hiring a dedicated code analyst in addition to a testifying expert, see the article: Selecting the Right Software Expert in Patent Disputes.

A dedicated software analyst provides a set of skills that is often quite different from a testifying expert. A good source code analyst is particularly trained and skilled at writing and reviewing code in the language (i.e., Java, C++, PHP, etc.) […]

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