What Tools are on Embedded Engineers’ Wish Lists?
With the holiday season now upon us in full force, we are constantly bombarded with commercials every time we turn on the television, the radio, or log onto the internet. All of these advertisements are aimed at convincing us why we need a certain type or brand of product.
In light of these ubiquitous reminders of one of the pillars of capitalism, we thought it would only be appropriate to share more about what embedded engineers think about the different products that they are using.
As part of a recent survey, we asked engineers how likely they were to use their current brand of tools again on future projects. Engineers could only rate the tool(s) that they were personally using on their current project.
So for what type of tool did engineers report the highest likeliness to reuse their current brand?
Proprietary language-based modeling tools – These are tools such as Esterel SCADE, The MathWorks MATLAB/Simulink, and National Instruments LabVIEW, among others. These tools are typically intended to automate the process of designing and simulating dynamic systems and control applications that often interact with complex physical phenomena. We also include stand-alone automated code generators commonly integrated with system modeling and simulation environments within this category.
How about the least likely to reuse their current brand?
Dynamic code testing tools – These are tools such as test coverage analysis, unit testing, integration/system testing, tracing, tuning, and other testing necessitating the execution of the program.
VDC’s View
A number of factors can influence an engineer’s likeliness to use the same brand of tools beyond just “brand loyalty” alone. Changes in project requirements, budgets, as well as higher-level corporate mandates can alter tool selection.
However, the information is nonetheless palpable. In the case of dynamic code testing tools, we believe that this speaks the relative maturity of the tools in that market as well as the parity of functionality offered by participants’ solutions. Additionally, this is a class of tools where many engineers report using open source and in-house developed solutions, further underscoring the lower barriers to migration/substitution between these tools.
When considering the differences in the tools categorized within the proprietary language-based modeling tool sector, it becomes easier to infer the reluctance and/or difficulty in migrating to other solutions. As the names of the tool category suggests, this market has its legacy in tools based upon proprietary languages. Whereas many vendors have undertaken substantial efforts in recent years to ease the adoption of and migration to their solutions, the use of these tools, however, is often institutional and engrained as part of mandated development methodologies.
VDC explores these trends among others in further detail as part of our 2009 Embedded Engineer Tool Perceptions & Preferences reports.
These reports provide engineer-reported ratings of 180+ different tools across 15 tool categories for 10 different criteria. These criteria include ratings of the tools’ impact on quality, time-to-market, and engineer productivity, among others.
For more information, please see the reports’ proposal, contact us directly, and/or read our previous blog posts.
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