AgileSoC

We did our first UVM-UTest challenge on Friday. It went surprisingly well so now we’re going out on a limb by inviting others to take the challenge.

The “rules” of the challenge are:

• A team of 3 has one hour to break our unit tests (we used a lunch hour so it was like a lunch-n-learn… except it wasn’t boring).
• If a team can make functional changes to the uvm-1.1d library that our tests do not detect, you win. If our unit tests detect the functional changes you make, the unit tests win. Pretty simple.
• We guide you through the challenge so you know what code/classes you’re able to change (we also keep notes for where we can improve our test suite). Continue reading →

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After less than a month of development, the open-source UVM-UTest project is ready for download by the masses. If you care about code quality and maintainability, you’ll be interested in what we have.

For instructions on how to download and run UVM-UTest, take a look at the UVM-UTest Getting Started page. If this is the first you’ve heard of UVM-UTest, you may also want to check out the original UVM-UTest announcement to see what we’re up to. In that announcement you’ll see links to the project charter and progress page. Also be sure to check out The Most Descriptive UVM Tests Ever Written. Those and others like it are part of today’s release.

The next step for us comes this Friday at Noon EST when we have our first UVM-UTest challenge. That’s where we challenge some of our colleagues to find holes in our unit test suite. If they can break the UVM library without our unit tests detecting it, they win. If our unit tests detect all the changes they make, we win. We’ll keep you posted on how that turns out!

..and of course… if you’re interested in taking the challenge, we’d be happy to hear from you !

-neil

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A colleague and I have just started a new open-source project that we think will demonstrate the merits of unit testing in hardware. It’s quite an ambitious project called UVM-UTest. The framework-under-test, in case it’s not obvious, is UVM.

The project is hosted on Github. If you’re interested in knowing more about what we’re doing, here’s a link to our UVM-UTest project charter. The entire project charter is one hand-written page so reading it won’t take long. It’ll give you a better idea of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. If you’re interested in the abbreviated version, I’m comfortable paraphrasing it as:

We’re unit testing UVM.

We have a progress page that shows you how far we’ve come so far. It shows classes and class members that we’ve unit tested. We update that a few times a day so it’s always quite current.

We’re about 3 weeks in and the project is going well. We’ve got about 250 unit tests that take about 10sec to run and we filed our first issues in the eda.org mantis database last week (you can filter out the issues filed by ‘Neil_Johnson’ to see what they are).

There’s a first planned release of UVM-UTest scheduled for June 7. That’s when you’ll be able to download the code and run the tests we have for yourself!

-neil

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