Author Archives: nosnhojn

About nosnhojn

I have been working in ASIC and FPGA development for more than 12 years at various IP and product development companies and now as a consultant with XtremeEDA Corp. My specialty for most of that time has been RTL functional verification where I have had a chance to work with some very experienced people and learn state of the art techniques. I really enjoy the challenges of being a verification engineer but as of late have come to wonder what lies beyond my verification bubble. That's lead me to agile software development and project management. There is a massive amount of material out there related to agile development. All of it is interesting and most of it should be applicable to hardware development in one form or another. So I'm here to find what agile concepts will work for hardware development and to help other developers use them successfully! You can find me at neil.johnson@agilesoc.com.

TDD And A New Paradigm For Hardware Verification

We’ve looked at why teams should consider doing TDD; we’ve looked at how the roles and responsibilities change between design and verification experts; now let’s look at when everything happens. This is the key to seeing how everything fits together. … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification, TDD | Tagged | 15 Comments

TDD In Hardware Development: Who Does What?

Welcome back for TDD month round 2! In our first post, Test Your Own Code!, we laid out some of the motivation for using TDD with some general discussion of the mechanics and benefits. If you read Test Your Own Code!, hopefully … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification, TDD | Tagged | 3 Comments

Test Your Own Code! (I’ve Got Better Things To Do)

November is TDD month on AgileSoC.com. This is the first of a few installments where we look at the potential of Test Driven Development (TDD) in hardware development. If you’re unfamiliar with TDD, the first and most obvious thing you’ll … Continue reading

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Does Constrained Random Verification Really Work?

Being that we’re a week away from TDD month on AgileSoC.com, I thought that an appropriate way to get people thinking in a different direction – yes… test-driven development would take us in a different direction – would be to … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification | 5 Comments

Guest Blog: I Tried It (Operation Basic Sanity) And I Liked It!

We’re happy to have another guest contributer to the AgileSoC blog. This one is special because it’s a case study on an exercise I’ve written about before and presented as part of my talk at Agile2011. I’ve called it The … Continue reading

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November is TDD Month On AgileSoC.com

It’s the biggest thing we’ve done on AgileSoc.com to date. We’ve been planning it for a while. Finally it’s going to happen (in about a month from now)! November is TDD month on AgileSoC.com Starting November 1st, we’ll be taking a … Continue reading

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Sir! Hands On Your Head And Step Away From The RTL!

A handy bit of guidance that I’ve gleaned from books on lean product development comes via the recognition that unfinished work sitting in someone’s in queue, which in lean manufacturing lingo is called inventory, is waste in your development process. … Continue reading

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Dear Agile Hardware Skeptic

This post is a little different than what I’ve been doing here so far because it’s directed at only 1 person. This person is new to agile. We have talked about it a few different times and last time we talked … Continue reading

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8 Ways To Avoid Ignorance Based Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is a term I heard several times at Agile2011 in Salt Lake City a couple weeks ago. As I heard people talking about it, exploratory testing seemed to be something that verification engineers should be familiar with. Admittedly, … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification | 2 Comments

Guest Blog: What’s All This Hardware Scrum Sprint Demo Stuff, Anyhow?

By: Rolf V. Ostergaard If you read about Scrum from the software world, you learn how important it is to make the sprint demo as close as possible to the real product in a realistic user scenario. Some obsess over it … Continue reading

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