Case Study: Leading Power Management Company achieves rapid root-cause detection of intermittent stack overflow and faster time-to-market with Parasoft static analysis

Static Analysis Identifies the Root Cause of Intermittent Erratic System Behavior

A leading power management company that builds safety-critical electrical, hydraulic and mechanical control systems needed to accelerate time to market without increasing software risk. They were hampered by a highly intermittent bug that, under a rare combination of inputs, caused a stack overflow and processor halt; months of investigation finally revealed a recursive call loop as the root cause.

During a static-analysis proof-of-concept, Parasoft’s tool was the only analyzer that pinpointed the defect in the legacy code, showing a one-line fix that took under five minutes to implement. The discovery convinced the team to adopt Parasoft, avoid thousands of dollars in debugging effort, and roll out a defect-prevention strategy—running static analysis on engineers’ desktops to catch root causes earlier across safety-critical projects.