Parasoft Reviews

Summary: Helps our organization focus on developing high-quality software that's compliant with industry standards.

Positive: Provides detailed reports and dashboards that offer insights into test coverage, defect density, code quality, and compliance. Parasoft’s static analysis tools help in identifying code defects, security vulnerabilities, and compliance issues early in the development cycle. Customer support is always helpful and kind.

Negative: The platform’s comprehensive feature set can be overwhelming, leading to a steep learning curve for new users. Proper training and onboarding are essential to effectively utilize the tools. Although Parasoft integrates with many CI/CD tools, integrating it with custom or less common development environments can be challenging and may require additional effort.

Summary: Flexible, configurable tool to statically analyze C++ code. Rule set licensing is somewhat complicated and non-intuitive.

Positive: Integrates with Eclipse via plugin and stand-alone command line tools, supports code generated by embedded cross-compilers such as arm-none-eabi-g++, uses project Makefile's to process source files, supports multiple C++ standards, has many different rule sets, including MISRA, MISRA C++, AUTOSAR, Joint Strike Fighter, DISA ASD STIG, ...

Uses project make files to process and analyze sources.

Negative: No macOS support only Linux and Windows. Requires use of a virtual machine when using macOS as the host OS.

Summary: Good, would recommend to keep as our SCA tool. Base use was easy to set up and would be quick to spin new users up on the tool.

Positive: Parasoft was easier to set up than any of the other SCA tools we tested. It allows for a lot of customization.

Negative: We had some issues getting our full licenses from Parasoft (example: unit tests)

Summary: Parasoft is a capable and feature-rich unit testing solution for C/C++ that shines in structured testing environments and can even be used for CI/CD pipelines. However, it demands patience and technical persistence due to a dated UI, unclear configurations, and occasional instability. For teams willing to invest the time to master its quirks and supplement it with custom infrastructure (e.g., custom Docker images, bash scripts), it offers strong ROI through automation, consistency, and integration capabilities.

Positive: Powerful features like generate stubs, generate test cases, and data sources streamline unit test creation and support parameterized testing, improving test coverage and reducing code duplication.

The DTP (Development Testing Platform) facilitates sharing test configurations across teams, promoting environment consistency.

Flexible reporting options (PDF, xUnit, HTML) make it easy to distribute test results.

cpptestcli offers helpful command-line access, making integration into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab via Docker) possible and efficient.

Technical support is responsive and helpful, which offsets some of the platform’s steep learning curve.

Negative: Setup can be brittle: project and workspace corruption errors (e.g., test log or temp folder access issues) often require complete workspace recreation.

Parasoft enforces rigid file structures and configuration heuristics, which may require disruptive codebase restructuring.

Test configuration and environment settings are often hard to locate, poorly documented, or missing altogether.

Generated tests provide only a starting structure, requiring manual rewriting for meaningful coverage.

cpptestcli lacks parity with the full IDE, especially around BDF imports and workspace manipulation.

DTP’s UI is dated, and settings management is cumbersome, requiring manual export/import for updates.

No official Docker image for the Professional version of C/C++test—users must build and maintain their own.

Poor support for collaborative workflows: heavy reliance on absolute paths and local environment settings makes it difficult to share and sync projects across team members seamlessly.

Summary: It's challenging to setup Parasoft. This make it difficult to convince the teammates to use it.

Positive: Good support for static code analysis.
Especially to tailor all settings to your needs e.g. generate a subset of misr2012 etc.

Negative: Licensing:
to use with vs code we need a different desktop license.
to use with docker on our build machine also requires a new license

Summary: Satisfied. will continue to use Parasoft BUT I must say that because some features I need are not supported - I will browse for alternatives.

Positive: I use c/c++ test and DTP version 2024.1. my interface is usually DTP GUI. the c/c++ test execute via scripts and i am less aware to the capabilities. in DTP I can define dashboards and see stats in a very clear way. the configuration is very agile and can be changed Easly to meet my requirements. support team communication works great.

Negative: I found few bugs in DTP GUI. I don't have easy way to report about these bugs to Parasoft support team. HIS standard is declared as supported but there is no way to generate clear report. some compilers we are using are not supported. some features I need are not available in the tool.