Aug23Written by:SuperUser
Monday, August 23, 2010 
Greetings!
We’re very pleased to announce the release of Jinx for Windows 1.0 and Jinx for Linux 1.0. Over the last six months, we’ve delivered two beta releases and have seen over 300 customers download and use Jinx. In that time, we’ve added support for finding bugs in native code on 64-bit Windows operating systems, 64-bit Linux operating systems, code written for the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime, and, with this final release, code written for Java and the Java Virtual Machine. This final release also includes improved performance and reliability in finding bugs on native code and in .NET code.
Jinx for Windows 1.0 and Jinx for Linux 1.0 are both available for developers at $1999 USD (see our Pricing and Licensing page for more information). You can purchase the product now in our online store. If you downloaded and participated in our beta program, you’ve already received an email good for $1800 off the online price (in other words, beta customers can purchase one license of Jinx for $199). If you’re looking for additional discounts in exchange for agreeing to provide timely and copious product feedback, consider joining our Early Adopter Program. We’ve also made a 30-day Trial Edition available as well as a special license for Academic and Non-Commercial Users.
Jinx has a licensing model that is consistent with most developer-related products in the industry. We recognize that most developers have more than one machine. To that end, a given license of Jinx is tied to a single individual user. That single individual user may install Jinx on as many machines as they personally use for application development or testing. This does not mean, however, that the individual user may install Jinx on a number of machines in a test lab environment. For that scenario, a license must be purchased for each machine in the lab that will need to run Jinx. Visit our website to learn more about our pricing and licensing model, as well as common scenarios for licensing Jinx.
As part of our final testing, we employed Jinx in our test lab of 20 machines to look for concurrency errors in popular open source software. Over the coming months, we’ll publish information about the many bugs we’ve found.
The first of these bugs is in the popular MySQL open source database. The bug originally manifested itself several months ago and took many months to find, diagnose, fix, and deploy the patch. We ran MySQL in our test lab and this bug manifested itself within 65 minutes without Jinx running. When we turned Jinx on, the bug manifested itself in under 2 minutes on Intel hardware and under 20 seconds on AMD hardware.
This is the core value proposition for Jinx: it makes your code “unlucky” so that bugs happen faster and earlier in the development cycle. Jinx explores several simulations of thread interleavings, looking for a particular interleaving that will cause a bug. When it finds such an interleaving, Jinx then “replays” the bug on the developer’s machine and pinpoints in the debugger the exact location where the bug occurred. We expect that using Jinx on your multi-threaded code will save you many hours of debugging and testing looking for concurrency errors and give you much greater confidence in your code.
Finally, we’ve built some resources to help you understand the economics of software testing and how Jinx can save your development organization time, resources, and money. The Economics of Jinx includes a whitepaper that describes the various financial levers that affect your development and testing costs, and soon a downloadable spreadsheet to use as a starting point for a more detailed analysis along with a manual for the spreadsheet. We’ll deploy even more resources over the coming weeks to give you both quick and detailed information about how Jinx can help save you money.
We hope you like what we’ve built. Our mission is to help software developers and QA professionals build higher quality software. We’ve got a pretty strong roadmap over the coming months and will be sharing our future plans with you shortly.
Thanks,
Prashant, the Marketing Guy
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