Today, Corensic announced availability of Jinx 1.5, a software quality tool for Linux and Windows that will help developers, testers, and IT organizations improve the reliability of their mission-critical software. Jinx greatly simplifies the task of finding concurrency errors in parallel applications, which ordinarily requires numerous manual steps and a great deal of luck. With this release, Jinx now offers Reports, the fastest and most reliable way to find data races and other concurrency errors in code. In addition, Jinx includes the world’s first and only data race reporting tool for kernel-mode software, providing software development organizations building custom operating system kernels, device drivers, and other lower-level applications with the means to build fast and reliable software.
Jinx Reports tracks and provides deep insight into code in applications, pinpointing definitive bugs as well as areas of concern that warrant further investigation and testing. This insight helps QA organizations to improve test coverage while enabling better communication with developers who reproduce and fix bugs. Jinx is a dynamic analysis tool that proactively simulates multi-threaded applications as they are running, in an effort to uncover concurrency bugs. When Jinx positively identifies a bug, it uses its SmartStop feature to stop the application and reposition the state of the application so that the developer can understand the bug’s cause. Through this process, Jinx accumulates a large amount of information on how the application is executed, which it subsequently presents in a Report. This information includes assertion failures, null pointer dereferences, general protection faults, and data races, all of which have varying degrees of likelihood of being actual bugs. Traditional race report tools are slow, difficult to use, and rife with false positives. Jinx is fast, easy to use, and reliable, enabling organizations to deploy significantly higher quality software in a fraction of the time and resources required otherwise. Finally, for the first time ever, data race reports can be created for kernel-mode software, enabling organizations building lower-level applications to exploit the performance of multi-core systems safely.
“With Reports, we’re now able to provide development organizations with deep insight into building multi-threaded and shared memory software. Our customers have seen immediate benefit in being able to build high quality parallel applications,” said Peter Godman, Founder and CEO of Corensic. “At Corensic, we understand how difficult it is to test multi-threaded applications. Jinx unlocks the performance of multi-core for developers, while helping them avoid the infuriating and unproductive debugging sessions that often come with it.”
“BlueView Technologies delivers state of the art, compact acoustic imaging and measurement. Our software uses highly parallelized systems to achieve its performance standards for fast, accurate acoustic data processing and user-friendly presentation,” said Cat Zimmermann, Lead Software Architect at BlueView Technologies. “Prior to using Jinx, BlueView Technologies employed many tried and true techniques for debugging multi-threaded code, but concurrency errors still crept into our software. With Jinx, our developers will be able to confidently explore the limits of processing power and deliver even more effective visuals and data of underwater structures, areas, targets, and objects.”
Leading experts point to the lack of robust developer and test tools as the greatest barrier to development of multithreaded software applications that are able to fully exploit multicore systems. With the release of Jinx 1.5, developers and testers have the ability to release better software sooner, with reduced costs.
When naming Corensic one of its Cool Vendors for 2011, the leading industry analyst firm Gartner remarked: “Identifying concurrency errors is increasingly important, because systems may run happily in testing or under many other conditions and then suddenly fail. This usually leaves little useful information for organizations to use to track down the problem or reproduce the defect. What is key about Corensic is that it discovers why the bug occurs, which is critical in this type of operation. Jinx is a good fit for agile organizations practicing continuous integration, while building Web services.”
Jinx is available for both Windows and Linux and a 14-day trial edition is available for immediate download at www.corensic.com.
