MONROVIA, CA. (March 15, 1999) - ParaSoft, leading provider of software development productivity solutions, announced today that SOLsoft chose Insure++^® to assist in their error detection as they developed the latest versions of their Network Security Software Editors. This decision came as a result of SOLsoft needing a reliable and thorough testing tool for their products.

French based SOLsoft's products include Net Partitioner, the first network policy security manager, and Net Security Master, the first firewall to integrate with strong authentication in the proxies.

As a result of using Insure++^®, SOLsoft uncovered several critical memory leaks. Gabriel Vernot, SOLsoft Test and Support Manager, says, "We discovered using Insure++^® that we were losing about 10% of the memory. This is especially important for Net Security Master, as it can run for months or even years without being restarted. With memory leaks, the program can run out of memory after some time and finally crash the system."

After testing programs with Insure++, SOLsoft found that Net Partitioner performed even better. "By inspecting memory allocation with Insure++^®," says Vernot, "we could optimize [Net Partitioner]." According to Vernot, "performance has been greatly enhanced, up to a factor of 1000 for some configurations."

Additionally, Insure++^® proved to be a valuable time saving tool. "With Insure++^®, we have been able to detect and to fix about 10 difficult bugs in about 2 days," says Vernot. He added that without Insure++^®, his team would have spent at least 3 weeks searching for those bugs.

Before deciding on Insure++, SOLsoft looked into using other development tools including NuMega's Bounds Checker and Rational's Purify. According to Vernot, "Both products didn't have the same level of functionality as Insure++^® and they didn't run on Linux, which is the development platform that we have chosen."

About Insure++^®

Insure++^® is an automatic runtime error-detection tool for C/C++ which improves software quality, accelerates time to market, and reduces development costs. Using patented Source Code Instrumentation (patent # 5,581,696) and Mutation Testing technology, Insure++^® finds bugs quickly and precisely and provides necessary information to repair the bugs immediately. It locates memory corruption due to reading or writing beyond the valid areas of global, local, shared, and dynamically allocated objects. It can also detect uninitialized, NULL or "wild" pointers, memory leaks, errors allocating and freeing dynamic memory, string manipulation errors, operations on pointers to unrelated data blocks, invalid pointer operations, incompatible variable declarations, and mismatched variable types in printf and scanf and argument lists.

Two add-on modules are available for Insure++^®. TCA is a total coverage analysis tool that keeps track of the parts of the program that have been tested and those that have not. Inuse graphically shows users how a program is allocating memory.

Availability

Insure++ v.4.1 is currently available by calling ParaSoft at (888) 305-0041 ext. 4. it operates on Windows 95/98/NT and a wide variety of Unix platforms, including SGI (Irix 6.x &6.x 64 bit), DEC (Alpha 3.x & 4.x), HP 10/11, AIX 4.x, Linux, Solaris 2.x and SunOS 4.x. For more information, visit our website at

About SOLsoft

SOLsoft is a leading edge company that publishes Internet/Intranet security software designed to manage highly demanding company networks. SOLsoft's products secure TCP/IP networks by combining proprietary technology with associated technologies acquired through major technological partnerships.

SOLsoft's headquarters is located at 4 bis, rue de la gare, 92300 LEVALLOIS-PERRET, France. Telephone +33 (0) 147 155 500. Fax +33 (0) 147 155 509. Email: info@solsoft.com. URL: www.solsoft.com

About ParaSoft

ParaSoft develops advanced software productivity tools for Windows and UNIX development platforms. ParaSoft's award-winning tools assist developers and managers in improving software quality, accelerating time to market, and reducing development costs. ParaSoft's headquarters is located at 2031 S. Myrtle Ave., Monrovia, CA 91016. Telephone (888) 305-0041, Fax: (626) 305-3036. Email: info@parasoft.com. URL:

ParaSoft and Insure++^® are registered trademarks of ParaSoft. All brands are registered trademark of their respective holders.
Editor note: Insure++^® screen shots and review copies are available.