Coverity Prevent is a commercial static source code analyzer that looks for errors such as inconsistent NULL checks, dead code, unused return values, missing break statement, etc.
Coverity Prevent is the old name for Coverity Static Analysis, a commercial product produced by Coverity, Inc.
Coverity Static Analysis exists for C/C++, Java and C#. The analysis works on the AST rather than on the source code. The AST is generated by Coverity's compiler which observes the native compiler and then outputs the AST for the analysis phase emulating the behavior of the native compiler.
The analysis phase runs multiple "checkers" which look for common defects along multiple paths (excluding those which are not feasible at run-time).
Common problems with running Coverity Static Analysis would be errors from "cov-build" or "cov-analyze" steps. Those are best addressed with Coverity support or on Coverity Developer Forums (http://communities.coverity.com/)
Questions which may be of interest to general development communities would be discussions of why a particular piece of code was flagged as being incorrect or suboptimal.
In most cases, it will be necessary to provide sufficient context to make clear what the analysis is flagging - this would include the code flagged as well as all relevant definitions of types, etc.
There have already been extensive discussions about the benefits of Static Analysis tools and comparison of free and commercial offerings, but any completely new questions of that type could be appropriate candidates for this tag.
