Avoid software crashes before they happen...

Though strictly speaking this could hardly be described as instrumentation nevertheless it does have possible applications that could be useful to the automation professional.

GrammaTech has announced the next version of CodeSonar. The release includes a radically improved graphical user interface to streamline developer interaction and boost productivity.

Critical industries need better software assurance, but growth in program complexity has made creating defect-free software more challenging than ever. Traditional approaches to testing can no longer provide adequate path coverage. CodeSonar’s program path analysis identifies major issues at compile time so they don’t crash an application in the field.

Over the last few years, many new static checkers have been added to CodeSonar that target emerging threats to reliability. Some of the new checkers find serious software quality problems. Others enforce safety-critical coding practices. Still others look for major security vulnerabilities.

Paul Anderson, GrammaTech’s vice president of Engineering, commented, “GrammaTech has always focused on providing high-value information, such as highlighting program-crashing defects and serious security vulnerabilities. A big strength of CodeSonar is that it identifies far more of these critical issues than competing static-analysis tools. With the interface redesign, we wanted to ensure that CodeSonar would still present all the information, but do it a way that would minimize the amount of time and effort a developer spends on reviewing results. We tasked an engineering team, headed by one of our user-interface experts, to develop a new approach to displaying results. After a lot of research and work, we came up with a fresh design that will enable developers to quickly digest key information, understand and identify the most important issues, and prioritize their fixes.”