ITWire

Around half of the time taken to develop software is spent on testing and debugging, Ralf Huuck, technical lead at Red Lizard Software, told iTWire. One way that can be reduced is by using tools that apply static analysis to the source code in order to identify problems such as memory leaks without having to run the software.

There is a $150 million market for such products, and that is expected to rise to $500 million in a few years, he said. But most products are aimed primarily at Fortune 500 businesses and are hard to integrate with other tools, he said.

In contrast, Red Lizard's Goanna (which analyses C and C++ code) is sold via the web, is priced from $US750 per seat, and integrates with popular integrated development environments. It can reduce development and testing costs by around 20%, claimed Huuck.

Red Lizard's approach was to adapt the model checking technology used by all the major semiconductor vendors to verify chip designs before manufacture.

This approach has proved successful as it makes it easy to add more checks, and it scales well as the number of checks increases. Importantly, it allows static analysis to be performed on the desktop or notebook computer used by the developer rather than requiring a server or other dedicated hardware.

Page 2 has more on Goanna.