Newsletter in September 2025

                        - Today’s tools from RAZORCAT und PERCEPIO
                - How do I explain it to my child (sorry, boss): Elevator Pitch
                                 - Can’t see the forest for the trees 
                                             - The right licensing
                                  - Percepio’s CEO: Andreas Lifvendahl                                   

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Errors in your development project are the best thing that can happen to your code. When developing embedded software, we often strive for perfection - but we only make real progress when something goes wrong. Surprising? Not really. Every error you discover is a gift. It is a sign that your tests are working. That your process is working. That your system is becoming more secure, stable, and reliable with every correction. Consider this: if your tests never fail, are they actually testing the right things? Strong tests put your code to the test. They stress it. They look for weaknesses. And when those weaknesses appear, that's when the real work begins—and the real value.

Today’s tools Failure is not the end—it's part of the journey. Every time you fall, you learn something. Every time you get back up, you become stronger. Champions are not those who never fall, but those who never give up. Our tools are designed to find the mistakes that others overlook or cannot find. Razorcat TESSY   TESSY from Razorcat now offers a groundbreaking innovation for the development of embedded software: seamless integration of requirements and test results. Managing requirements across multiple tools and formats can be complex in embedded software projects. TESSY simplifies this with powerful import and export functions for requirements documents, including CSV/TSV, XML with nested chapters, and the widely used ReqlF standard. Read more about automated testing of embedded software with TESSY.

Percepio TRACEALYZER   Are you tired of endless hours of debugging embedded C/C++ code? Say goodbye to tedious debugging and accelerate development with Percepio Tracealyzer. Take advantage of visual trace diagnostics, which enable you to detect and analyze software anomalies during development and in deployed devices. Traditional debugging is often ineffective for today's complex RTOS or Linux systems and can take up 40 to 50% of development time. Use visual trace observability to accelerate your daily debugging and solve problems where traditional debugging fails. Learn how Tracealyzer simplifies debugging. Here you can find everything you need to know about Tracealyzer.

How do I explain it to my child (sorry, boss) Once you are convinced of the tool's value and want to purchase it for your company, you face another hurdle that needs to be overcome: In order to obtain approval and authorization for the purchase, you need to convince your (usually non-technical) supervisor of the value of Tracealyzer, preferably at a glance. But how do you go about doing that? Elevator Pitch   Americans have a vivid name for precisely this task: elevator pitch. In other words: How do I get my message across (convincingly!) in the short time I spend riding in the elevator with my boss? With Tracealyzer, this is quite simple. An electronics/software engineer costs at least €200 per hour in our country, including wages, taxes, social security contributions, and infrastructure costs. (You will know the exact value in your company). Divide the purchase price of a license by the number of engineering hours saved, and you will see how quickly Tracealyzer pays for itself: The node-locked license costs €1,995, divided by €200 per hour, results in the astonishingly low value of 9.9 hours (let's say around 10 hours for simplicity's sake). So if an engineer saves 10 hours during the tool's lifetime, it has already paid for itself. The value of the tool   When we receive comments like these from customers... "Tracealyzer has doubled our development speed. Problems that would have taken days to solve in the past are now obvious with this tool and can be fixed quickly. We use it all the time.“ or "With Tracealyzer, I was able to quickly understand and solve serious multithreading issues that would have taken at least two weeks otherwise. I was able to solve this issue in a single day." ... you will understand the value of this tool. It confirms my statement that the value of this tool cannot be overestimated. From a commercial point of view, it pays for itself within a very short time.

Can’t see the forest for the trees However, there is one thing that no developer can avoid: you first have to learn how to use Tracealyzer in a meaningful and targeted way. Tracealyzer provides access to an enormous amount of information. This can be confusing at first glance. Learning how to handle this information correctly and find the “common thread” in order to get to the root of specific causes of problems takes some time. It's not rocket science, but it does require a certain amount of basic knowledge and practice in using the tool. For a meaningful introduction, you can proceed as follows: When you open a trace in Tracealyzer, it is usually opened in a vertical timeline. This view, which shows all activities in the system, is in many ways the core of Tracealyzer. Most other views are linked to this timeline. With its enormous amount of information, this first view is not always the best starting point. It is quite possible to not see the forest for the trees. The best way to get started with Tracealyzer is to visit the “Getting Started with Tracealyzer” page. There you will find getting started guides for each supported RTOS, videos, and much more: Tracealyzer 4: A short demonstration showing some (but not all) of the many new features. Trace visualization: Walk-through of visualization in the main trace view, what is displayed and how. Navigating and searching: Explains the basic functionality of the main trace view, including zooming, scrolling, and finding relevant events. Be sure to read the user manual that comes with Tracealyzer (see the “Help” menu). Especially the section on creating and loading traces. If you have any questions, please contact us at support@percepio.com. We appreciate your feedback.

The right licensing   Percepio has simplified its licensing options and better adapted them to project requirements. The current subscription license is an all-inclusive solution: With a subscription license, you can use Tracealyzer with all operating systems supported by Percepio (FreeRTOS, Zephyr RTOS, Azure RTOS ThreadX, Keil RTX5, Linux, VxWorks, MC/OS-III, On Time RTOS-32, and bare metal (without RTOS). This is the best solution for development groups of any size, even if projects are running on different RTOSs in parallel. A subscription license is a good option if you have not yet decided on your RTOS and are currently evaluating several. Here you will find an overview of the various license options. The sooner you get an idea of the advantages and benefits of Tracealyzer, the sooner your project will benefit—and ultimately you yourself.

Percepio’s CEO: Andreas Lifvendahl   The best way to introduce Andreas Lifvendahl is with a quote: "Percepio will continue to support the developer community and follow the trends in modern software development to better meet the challenges ahead. We call this concept Continuous Observability. The hard boundaries between development, integration, testing, deployment, device monitoring, and maintenance are dissolving. Development never stops, and we believe that product teams should not only have the same level of observability and insight throughout the product lifecycle as they have in the initial development phase, but that they are also entitled to it. They have the right to stay informed—because development never stops, and neither should creativity."

We hope you have a pleasant start to autumn after the beautiful summer weeks. Sincerely Yours, Marian A. Wosnitza   „The disadvantage of intelligence is that you are forced to learn continuously." (George Bernhard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish writer)