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March 13, 2000

Vendor Uses Y2K Knowledge For Development Tools
Data Integrity testing suite is designed to find bugs during the development process

By Charles Waltner

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ow does a year 2000 testing tool vendor succeed in the new millennium? By leveraging earlier innovations in new development-tool products.

Data Integrity Inc. is rolling out a suite of testing tools to help programmers more quickly and thoroughly find bugs throughout the software development process.

Building on its Y2K tools, Millennium CrossCheck and Millennium Solution, the new Data Integrity products, achieve unusually rapid testing speeds by parsing and distilling application source code into a database and identifying only those lines of programming that are possibly related to the bug. It uses proprietary mathematical algorithms and other techniques to assess the internal logic of a program. The refined code, whether a mainframe or client-server language, is displayed in a PC-based graphical user interface.

Data Integrity introduced the first of its three new applications, called Trace-IT, late last month. The tool helps testers and programmers find the source of corrupted data and other operational glitches. Trace-IT reveals the logic flow of a program, shows source code, and provides lists of variables.

The second tool in the suite is Code-IT, which Data Integrity plans to release in late April. Code-IT will let programmers test code before they compile it, then integrate it into other parts of a program, eliminating the need to search out bugs later in the development process.

The third product will test every logical decision point in an application, says Allen Burgess, Data Integrity's CEO. It will offer a more thorough and quicker alternative to the typical approach of running scripts that simulate the possible ways users might navigate through a program. Data Integrity plans to start selling that application in late summer.

While Data Integrity's background is with legacy languages such as Cobol, PL1, and RPG, the company plans to release versions of its new tools in C and is considering versions for Java, C++, and Visual Basic.

Pricing for Trace-IT will run $50,000 to $150,000, depending on the size of the program and number of users. Code-IT will cost $5,000 to $25,000 per seat, depending on the language and other variables. Pricing for the third product has not been determined.

The privately held company has 30 employees and more than 40 customers for its Y2K remediation applications, including Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Credit Suisse First Boston, the U.S. Air Force, and Westinghouse. It's looking to tap the same market for the new tools.

Photo by Gordon Morioka Ed Negrelli, a program manager for I.M. Systems Group Inc., a Dayton, Ohio, computer-testing and vulnerability-assessment service, says he likes Data Integrity's approach. Most testing tools operate like "glorified search engines" in that they look for keywords such as "date" to find bugs, he says.

However, just as with Internet search engines, the effectiveness of these tools depends greatly on how well the user can guess what the important key words are. In this case, testers need to be experts in the application's particular language or with the application.

But Data Integrity's Trace-IT distills code into a graphical interface that makes it possible for nonexpert testers to find problems, says Rich Evans, an analyst with Meta Group. Evans says Data Integrity's technology is "an intriguing way to make sense out of code. For the time being, it's a unique product."

Other companies with applications that trace the source of a bug include CompuWare Corp. and Mercury Interactive Corp., Evans says. "Obviously, they're going against the big guys in the testing world," he says.

Negrelli and I.M. Systems Group conducted extensive testing for U.S. Defense Department operations and private businesses using Data Integrity's CrossCheck, and is impressed so far. The application, Negrelli says, was typically three to four times faster than comparable testing tools while proving even more accurate. "We were able to find errors everyone else missed," he says of the products.

Also, Negrelli says, the Data Integrity products are easy to use. While "workbench" testing packages from vendors such as Tivoli Systems Inc. have many powerful functions similar to Data Integrity's new tools, these functions are much more complicated to use, and take longer to learn, he says.

Negrelli says he believes the new Data Integrity testing suite will help catch other programming flaws, such as spurious go-to routines or hard-coded passwords, as well as rapidly tracking data corruption errors before they can do extensive damage.

Still, Burgess says, the biggest challenge for Data Integrity will be convincing the market that its products are really as good as Data Integrity says they are. And since the company didn't make as much money from sales of Y2K tools as it had hoped, marketing may hold the key to the new products' success as well.

Photo of Negrelli by Gordon Morioka

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