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Parasoft’s Application Development Quality solution ingrains quality into the team’s application development process. As developers write code, our automated infrastructure monitors the team’s compliance to the organization’s policies for ensuring that quality is built into the code and maintained in response to changing business needs. This can include static analysis, peer code review, unit and component testing, and regression testing. Parasoft’s expertise in unobtrusively integrating these software verification methods into existing development workflows is key to establishing a practical and sustainable quality process. Moreover, to ensure that the resulting quality process remains on track, reports provide managers visibility into policy adherence and alert them to areas where process improvement might be valuable.

The Challenge

Many organizations attempt to implement quality initiatives by introducing software verification methods such as unit testing, peer code review, or static analysis, but find that their efforts eventually decay as schedule/budget pressures emerge, policies and projects evolve, and employees come and go. The few organizations that enjoy long-term success are the ones that make quality an integral part of their day to day workflow. That's why it's important to choose a solution that not only leverages automation to guarantee verification methods are applied consistently, but also addresses the workflow details essential to a sustainable, scalable quality process–like routing each reported issue directly to the responsible developer and providing managers one-click updating of the test configurations on thousands of developer desktops.

Solution Scope

Our solution scope includes:

• Static code analysis using industry-standard and custom rules: To ensure that the code meets uniform expectations around security, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Data flow analysis: To enable early and effortless detection of critical runtime errors that might otherwise take weeks to find.
• Metrics analysis: To identify brittle or overly-complex code that could impede agility.
• Peer code review process automation: To ensure that all new code gets reviewed by peers and all identified issues are resolved.
• Unit test generation and execution: To start verifying reliability and functionality before the complete system is ready, reducing the length and cost of downstream processes such as debugging.
• Automated regression testing: To ensure that the team is alerted when modifications impact application behavior.
• Test case "tracing": To extend the existing regression test suite by simply running use case scenarios on the working application.
• Runtime error detection: To automatically identify difficult-to-find errors that could cause the application to behave erratically or crash.

Parasoft Delivers Quality as a Continuous Process

Parasoft empowers organizations to deliver better business applications faster. We achieve this by delivering quality as a continuous process across the SDLC–not just QA. Our solutions promote strong code foundations, solid functional components, and robust business processes. Parasoft's Application Development Quality solution provides an automated infrastructure that delivers quality as a continuous process, allowing you to ensure that quality is built into Java, C/C++, and .NET code, then maintained as the code base evolves in response to changing business needs.

Error Prevention
Parasoft's Application Development Quality solution automates a wide variety of software verification methods (including peer code review, static analysis, data flow analysis, and metrics analysis) in a way that ensures they are a natural part of each team's software development process. By exposing structural errors as they are introduced and preventing entire classes of errors, it provides a foundation for producing solid code. This initiates the continuous quality process, delivering greater productivity and significantly fewer software defects.

Continuous Regression Testing
Parasoft's Application Development Quality solution automatically builds and continuously executes a robust, extensible regression test suite that determines if code modifications impact existing functionality. The test suite is designed to run independent of the complete system to isolate code behavior changes, reduce setup complexities, and ensure that it is practical to execute on a daily basis. By providing a safety net that alerts the team when modifications impact application behavior, it enables rapid and agile responses to business demands.

Functional Audit
When error prevention and continuous regression testing are performed at the development level, QA and business analysts can focus on validating end-to-end business scenarios, and even reuse existing test assets to achieve this goal. This enables your team to execute a more complete audit of your business application. The result is a reduced risk of business downtime, ensuring business continuity.

Process Visibility and Control
SDLC quality metrics are fragmented across key systems such as requirements, build, and source control management. Parasoft aggregates and correlates this system data, delivering a comprehensive view of your development processes. This process visibility facilitates continuous process improvement, increasing productivity and reducing cost.

Technologies Supported

C/C++ Java .NET languages (C#, Visual Basic, Managed C++)

Compatible Software and Platforms

Eclipse Rational Application Developer Microsoft Visual Studio Wind River Borland IntelliJ Oracle BEA Software AG/webMethods IBM MQ-Series TIBCO Sonic IONA HP Other leading platforms