Zaltbommel, The Netherlands – February 10, 2016 – Today, Vector Fabrics announced the full release of Pareon Verify, a dynamic analyzer that detects hard-to-find errors that appear only in the execution of an application. Due to their sensitivity to changes in timing and environment, run-time errors tend to be missed by traditional testing and have a greater likelihood of not being found until they cause problems in the field. At this point, however, the error may have resulted in serious injury, loss of life, or a destroyed brand. And, according to a NASA study, in-field errors cost 100 times more to correct than errors identified during software development. Pareon Verify enables companies to avoid such consequences.
In embedded systems, whether smartphones, automobiles, airplanes, or medical devices, the number of lines of code often exceeds tens of millions, with cars easily surpassing 100 million. Significantly increased code complexity, with added risk of race conditions or “software glitches,” has resulted in a breed of bugs that are particularly difficult to detect via traditional methods as changes to the system in a run-time environment cause such errors to disappear.
Pareon Verify exposes the hard-to-find bugs that avoid detection and cause problems in the field. Memory and concurrency errors, among others, are notoriously elusive and add significant time and development cost. Due to their complexity and dynamic nature, traditional testing using static analysis and unit testing cannot find these types of errors as it is impossible to check the unlimited number of variations in timing and memory allocations for every code path.
“Software errors detected after deployment are not only exponentially more expensive to fix, but can negatively impact the brand and reputation of the system provider,” said Martijn Rutten, CEO and Co-Founder of Vector Fabrics. “Pareon Verify, a kind of MRI scanner for millions of lines of code, protects providers from this kind of risk. Pareon Verify analyzes the behavior of the system and pinpoints software errors at their origin so that they are easy to fix. Pareon Verify makes the laborious detection of hard-to-find errors through lengthy debug sessions a thing of the past.”
Altran Intelligent Systems, a global integrator of highly connected and complex embedded and real-time systems, identified the advantage of using Pareon Verify to identify hard-to-find errors. “Even though we extensively tested our network stacks using functional tests and static analysis, beta versions exhibited unexpected behavior once they were deployed in the field,” said Jan Asselman, Quality Team Leader at Altran Intelligent Systems. “The dynamic verification capabilities in Pareon Verify enabled us to detect and fix a number of coding errors that previous testing had missed. Thanks to Pareon Verify, we have been able to eliminate those errors and deliver a product that meets our high-quality standards.”
Pareon Verify captures the stream of events that take place as a program executes and then studies those events for behavioral errors. It then reports the errors in a clear and concise way with detailed references to source code for easy correction of the errors. By implementing Pareon Verify at the beginning of development, companies can follow a process of continuous integration in which a central server builds and runs a test on all newly added source code, checking for errors immediately while the code is fresh in the developers’ minds and can be more easily fixed.
Availability
Pareon Verify is available immediately for C and C++ software on x86 and ARM platforms.
About Vector Fabrics
Vector Fabrics, founded in 2007 by experts in the field of programming for multicore systems, specializes in development and testing tools for the complex software used in embedded systems, such as automotive, IOT devices, network equipment, consumer electronics, aerospace, medical and industrial systems. The Pareon family of dynamic analysis tools provides customers developing sophisticated embedded systems deep insight into how their software will behave when executed, enabling them to build systems to a higher level of reliability, safety, and performance. With Pareon Verify, engineers can prevent software errors and shorten time-to-market of their products. For more information, please visit www.vectorfabrics.com.
