Page 168 - The Art of Designing Embedded Systems

Troubleshooting Tools 155

And, management must understand that time costs money-real
money, not just sunk costs. Further, crummy development environments
never yield faster product introductions.
This is not a Dilbert-like rant against managers. We’re all infatuated
with the latest technology, and we all are convinced that, this time, bugs
won’t be as big of a problem as last time.
Embedded processors will continue to get faster and more highly in-
tegrated-and will generally become much tougher to work on than those
of yesteryear. That’s a fact as sure as salary inflation and time-to-market
pressures .
It’s largely up to the developers doing the work to educate manage-
ment, and to make intelligent decisions yielding debuggable products.
Often we are perceived as wanting everything without decent justifi-
cations. Faster computers, private offices, better software tools. Without
educating our bosses about how these things save them money, we’ll lose
most battles.
A common joke is the “capital equipment justification,” all too often
more an exercise in creative writing than in fact gathering and analysis.
Sometimes tool vendors will present you with spreadsheets of savings
from using their latest widget, but none of us really trusts these figures. It’s
far better to use hard-hitting, quantitative data accumulated from your own
hard-won experience. Don’t have any? Shame on you!
One well-known bug reducer is recording each bug, stopping and
thinking for a few seconds about how you could have avoided making the
mistake in the first place. Take this a step further and think through (and
record!) how you found it, using what tools. Log it all in an engineering
notebook as you work; it’s a matter of a few seconds’ time, yet will help
you improve the way you work. This notebook will also serve as the raw
data for your cost justifications. If that cruddy freeware compiler gener-
ated a bad opcode that took a day to find, a little math quickly will show
how much money a multi-thousand-dollar commercial package would
save.
As you educate management, educate yourself, and remember those
lessons when you’re the boss!
Years ago I worked for a small, 100-person outfit that experienced a
wealth of financial difficulties. Half of the phone calls were from angry
creditors. The bank was perpetually on the brink of closing us down. Still,
our small engineering group always had a reasonable set of tools. Good
scopes then cost upwards of $lO,OOO, a lot of money in 1975 dollars. We
even managed to get one of Intel’s first microprocessor development sys-
tems. Though we engineers had to cajole and plead with management for