We asked what would be the one thing you would improve about your embedded design activities (Figure 9). The winner, by more than a factor of 2X is the debugging tools. Looking at the year-on-year results for the same question, the number of people who responded "programming tools" dropped from 25% in 2005 to just 10% in 2007.

Gatliff says that the analysis of this one is easy. "People just want better tools period. The drop in programming tools could be because Eclipse is starting to address some of people's complaints with debugging tools. Also, there are now programming-tool vendors that have offer tools that can do simultaneous kernel and application debugging under Linux, which, in my opinion, is an amazing feat."

Barr says, "The key here would be scheduling, getting the product out the door faster. I'm surprised people are looking for better debuggers, because that doesn't really help you design. If you're spending your time in the debugger trying to find a problem, you're in trouble. I've actually spent hours watching people in the debugger not learning a thing, when all you have to do is reason out the problem, know how computers work. Then use the debugger to confirm your suspicions."

Here's one that made me smile. I've been preaching to the processor vendors for years that it's all about the tools. It doesn't make any difference if you got the best, fastest, lowest-power processor in the world. If you don't have the right ecosystem built around that processor, you will not succeed (Figure 10).

Outsourcing
A topic that's been discussed a lot recently, particularly by yours truly, is the issue of outsourcing, whether that work is done here in the States or abroad. About 39% of the respondents say that they've been involved in one or more projects that were either partially or completely outsourced (Figure 11).

Twice as many of those projects that were outsourced went outside the U.S. You get one guess as to which region outside the U.S. most of the work was outsourced to. Time's up--India (Figure 12).