Hewlett-Packard Co is offering a version of its SoftBench software engineering product for the Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstation, the first time that SoftBench has been made available on workstations other than those made by Hewlett or its Apollo Systems Division: SoftBench is designed to co-ordinate and control the separate programs that software engineers use to design, build and test software products, integrating tasks for developing software in a similar manner to the way word-processing programs integrate dictionary, thesaurus and grammar-checker functions, Hewlett suggests; it is designed to integrate data among the programs and make it easier for programmers to make changes at any stage of the development process; it is also offering Encapsulator, which enables SoftBench to be customised by adding third party tools on the Sparcstation; the new versions are promised for mid-year at less than $3,000 per workstation.
