Newsletter in June 2024

                  - 25 years of experience in testing embedded systems
                             - The testers are tested (and verified)
                                 - Trace & Visualize with Tracealyzer
                       - Cloud-connected observability with DevAlert
                                  - Is any of this really working yet?
                                            - Error or break-in ?

                                      - Continuous observability

                                           - Be one of the first

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Testing embedded systems is now more important than ever to assess their quality and reliability. Our partner RAZORCAT, headquartered in Berlin, is exclusively dedicated to the development of test tools, test software and state-of-the-art test methods for testing embedded systems.

25 years of experience in testing embedded systems RAZORCAT has over 25 years of experience with highly complex, safety-critical embedded systems. Standards-compliant, independent and structured testing are among the company's specialties. The origins of the company lie in the automotive industry. In recent years, however, the focus of applications has expanded to other markets in which high-quality tests are urgently required: Aviation, aerospace, electronics, medical technology and heavy industry.  Its customers include well-known companies such as Airbus, Mercedes-Benz AG, BMW Group, Siemens, Samsung Electronics, Continental and Bosch. RAZORCAT offers the full range of professional and customized testing services. In addition to conducting tests, seminars are also offered for those who want to set up their own test team. RAZORCAT's solutions are user-friendly, state-of-the-art tools that automate and facilitate the testing process for its global customer base. They ensure the safety and reliability of the products for which they are used. The trust that RAZORCAT enjoys with its customers is testament to its reliability and quality.  The in-house developed software product range includes CCDL, CTE, TESSY, TOP/TRM and ITE. If required, RAZORCAT offers consulting during the entire testing process.

The testers are tested (and verified)   RAZORCAT is certified annually to ensure sustainable quality. This year, too, the audit of its quality management system was recently carried out and successfully completed. As RAZORCAT specializes in standard-compliant, safety-critical tests, the quality of its own processes for the development, delivery and support of the tools should also be proven. RAZORCAT's quality management system is regularly audited by the German Zertifizierungsstelle der TÜV SÜD Management Service GmbH. The annual audit took place on March 14, 2024 in accordance with the latest edition of the EN ISO 9001:2015 standard. ISO 9001 is a standard for quality management systems. It ensures that well-structured and clear processes are in place to provide high quality tools and services, and ensures that management is driven by the pursuit of continuous process improvement and risk management. RAZORCAT fulfills all requirements of the EN ISO 9001:2015 standard. All core processes in development, sales, support and services, such as training and testing services, have been covered by the certification process.  The widely used test tool TESSY is ISO 26262 certified to meet the high standards in the industry. ISO26262 is a standard for the development of safety-critical systems in the automotive sector.

Trace & Visualize with Tracealyzer With Percepio Tracealyzer, embedded software developers can accelerate debugging, optimize performance and verify software timing. Tracealyzer requires no special hardware, records and visualizes key events in your embedded software. The data can be streamed to the host application to record long traces or stored in a circular RAM buffer for snapshots. Tracealyzer supports most popular RTOS platforms, and you can work with almost all popular processor families. Tracealyzer can be used with any compiler, including GCC, Clang, IAR Embedded Workbench and others.  Download the latest version v4.9.0. of Tracealyzer for immediate testing. Among other things, you will see improved Linux support and updated TraceRecorder support for ThreadX and SafeRTOS.

Cloud-connected observability with DevAlert Percepio also offers a cloud-connected solution for continuous observability in system testing, field testing and deployment, Percepio DevAlert. This includes trace analyzer support as well as remote debugging support at source code level, for example for hard error exceptions. When presenting Percepio's products and solutions to various development teams, a few things stand out. There is no question that ultra-connectivity for embedded devices is here - or at least the desire for it. Device management, application performance management and, last but not least, edge observability are in high demand - but the real question is:

Is any of this really working yet?   The universe of embedded edge devices is very heterogeneous, and the existing device monitoring solutions are usually only able to show you a huge fleet of black boxes. We've often heard, “You come to work and you have thousands of alarms from devices all screaming: Help, nothing's working!” What good is that except to cause general panic and despair? Imagine if this was an emergency call from a crime scene. You would need a lot of information quickly, so you would send a forensic team to investigate. In order for the software team to find a quick solution, they need deep observation capabilities, such as access to core dumps and software traces down to the lowest levels of execution.  The problem is probably obscure, having escaped the testing phase, and maybe it's a hairy problem from multithreaded execution, with specific boundary conditions that no one has thought of. And most importantly, the team wants the problem to be reproducible.

Error or break-in ? Worse still, is the problem perhaps not an accident at all, but a malicious attempt to break into your system? In this situation, how much would it be worth to you if you had the ability to replay everything that happened on your device up to a millisecond before the problem? Embedded software tends to exhibit repeatable behavior and leave “fingerprints” with high accuracy. This enables automatic anomaly detection of many types of issues, including elusive bugs, software timing issues, untested code paths and cyber-attacks. Your device must be capable to automatically detect those anomalies on site.

Continuous observability These capabilities will be integrated into both the cloud-hosted DevAlert service and a new product from Percepio - let's call it “DETECT” for now - that will be optimized for test labs and on-site deployment in private, isolated networks. Percepio understands that there are no longer hard boundaries between development, testing and deployment. The company is putting its heart and mind into making continuous observability a reality. It just doesn't feel right to cut the feedback cable to your product as soon as it leaves the development table - keep it plugged in!

Be one of the first    Would you like to be one of the first to find out details about the new “DETECT” as soon as they are available? Click here and join the list of the first interested parties. Stay curious. Yours Sincerely, Marian A. Wosnitza “In the future, utopia will have to hurry,  if it wants to catch up with reality.” (Wernher von Braun, German/US rocket engineer)