Of the top seven rankings in the study, all but two were for debugging tools: debugger, scope, JTAG/BDM, logic analyzer, and ICE. This result shows just how hard it is to get firmware right. It also suggests just how broken our development strategies are. Why spend so much time debugging? Another philosophy, one that actually works, is to not inject the defects in the first place. Companies that embrace that approach get higher quality code on a shorter schedule. In examining 4,000 software projects, Capers Jones found defects to be the biggest contributor to late schedules.⁴

Consider, for instance, the SPARK approach, also called "Correctness by Construction."⁵ Projects done with SPARK have almost unmeasurable error rates. Even better, the tools are now free.

Other Tools
In the Embedded Market Study, the IDE came in at 29%.¹ No separate entry existed for the editor, so I presume most rolled that into their IDE response. Certainly the subject of editors is one that spurs the most passion of all among firmware people. The VI folks will never be swayed by the mad bayings of, well, I don't plan to open either the seventh seal of hell or the editor war.

The IDE complements and contains the debugger, and it is the environment that is open on the desktop more than any other tool. We have too many IDEs: every tool vendor seems to supply their own. Switching processors usually means changing the development toolchain, which means learning an entirely new set of procedures. That's great for vendors who can exploit this to lock customers in to their products, but not so wonderful for engineers trying to make reasonable technical decisions.

One of the most hopeful changes in the tool landscape was the appearance of Eclipse, a sort of universal open-source IDE that can handle vendor plug-ins. Yeah, it needs a lot of resources to run well, but resources are cheaper every year. Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry claims the name was chosen to "eclipse" Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE.⁶ That has not happened. It's hard to get decent data on the use of Eclipse in the embedded world, but judging from the number of press releases on Embedded.com from vendors offering compatible products, it's increasing. I suspect few vendors will release proprietary IDEs anymore, though.