Why Trace Should Be in Your Development Toolbox

March 21, 2022

Percepio's Johan Kraft talks about how trace tools significantly enhance debugging tasks.

This video is part of TechXchange: Trace Debugging Techniques. You can also check out more TechXchange Talks videos.

Trace tools like Percepio's Tracealyzer offers a debugging methodology that's distinctly different than stop/start breakpoint debugging provided by a conventional debugger like gdb. Trace tools can find real-time issues like race conditions and handshake issues that are difficult to identify with a conventional debugger.

I talked with Percepio's CEO, Johan Kraft, about how trace works, what advantages it brings to a developer's toolbox, and how it can be used in the field as well. You also can check this short demo (Fig. 1) on Tracealyzer.

This short video demonstrates some of Tracealyzer's features.

Tracealyzer is just one of many trace tools available to developers. Others include Lauterbach's Real-time Trace, Ashling's RiscFree, and Green Hills Software's TimeMachine.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.