Reasoning Inspection Service for Java Boosts Productivity
5/5/2003 - Reasoning Inc. announced the availability of Reasoning Inspection Service for JavaTM, which extends the company's suite of automated software inspection services into Java development environments. The outsourced service provides a fast, efficient, and effective means to identify, locate, and fix defects in Java code early in the development process, and represents an essential addition to existing software development and QA methodologies.
The Reasoning Inspection Service for Java consists of automated static analysis that provides many of the benefits of a manual code review, but in significantly less time and at dramatically lower cost. Reasoning detects and diagnoses defects well before they become discernible problems and steers development teams to the exact location for remedy and resolution.
Reasoning boosts the productivity of development teams by pinpointing logic defects that reduce reliability, identifying the areas in the code of greatest risk, and increasing execution path coverage to over 90 percent. By using the Reasoning Inspection Service, the entire process of code inspection typically takes less than two weeks.
"Although the Java language is, inherently, less defect-prone than C and C++, testing and debugging continue to account for much of the cost of developing Java applications," said Reasoning President and CEO William S. Payne. "Reasoning's automated software inspection service for Java makes it practical to inspect every line of source code in a Java application before software development teams enter the test phase."
"Java is growing in popularity and is used by more than 70 percent of professional software developers in North America," said Dick Heiman, application development and deployment research director at IDC. "Improving the quality of Java code is an important issue and increasingly robust tools and services are required to address quality concerns. We believe that there are significant benefits to be gained by incorporating static analysis into development methodologies, including the ability to identify and locate defects early, while they are relatively inexpensive to fix. Automated code inspection services, such as those offered by Reasoning, have the capability to accelerate development and product delivery at a lower cost."
Types of Defects Found
Reasoning can uncover a range of structural defects that cause abnormal behavior, crashes or data corruption in Java applications. With the Reasoning Inspection Service, these defects are reported, identified, and averted.
"In spite of the safeguards of garbage collection, strong type checking and run-time checking of array bounds and object dereferences, Java applications are still released with numerous defects," said Jeff Klagenberg, Reasoning director of product development. "Once a Java application is deployed, it's even more difficult and costly to fix software faults."
The classes of identified defects for Java include:
- Null Pointer Dereferences that occur when a member of a null variable is accessed; they can cause issues from resource leaks to application failure.
- Out of Bounds Array Access defects that occur when an array index expression is not within the upper and lower bounds of the array; they can result in data corruption and application failure.
- String Comparison defects, in which two String objects are compared using either the "= =" or "!=" operators instead of the String comparison methods available on the String object. If Strings are not properly compared, the software program will not execute as designed.
- During beta testing of the Reasoning Software Inspection Service for Java, the company found that approximately 45 percent of defects that were identified, diagnosed, and remedied would have caused failures.
About Reasoning
Reasoning Inc. is the leading provider of automated software inspection services that help development organizations reduce the time and cost involved in finding software defects. The company's business is focused on organizations that develop Java, C, and C++ applications. Reasoning is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Contact Reasoning at (650) 316-4400 or at www.reasoning.com.
Reasoning, and the Reasoning logo are trademarks and/or service marks of Reasoning Inc.
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