An Adherent Responds to the Heretic

Posted on by Bryan Morris

About a year ago, Mike Thompson said that as much as he liked what Neil and I were doing with the AgileSoC, he just didn’t think the agile methodologies fit all that well with hardware. He then said that he wanted to find the time to write to us with his thoughts. I encouraged him to write a post for the AgileSoC blog promising that we would definitely post it. My reasoning is that while Neil and I are quite pro-agile, we realize that it is not a great solution for every team (just most teams). I very much wanted to hear opposing views pointing out the problems so that we could create an open discussion to either a) accept that those problems are limitations of agile; and/or b) find solutions to address those issues raised.

Thanks very much to Mike for starting this discussion.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should read it here before you read this post! I’ll stop pestering him now for the article. We’d encourage any others to consider posting. If we let Mike have a go, we’ll likely let you too!

Continue reading →

Guest Blog: A Heretic Speaks (Why Hardware Doesn’t Fit the Agile Model)

Posted on by nosnhojn

Fair to say that what we’ve posted on AgileSoC.com to date is decidedly pro-agile. Bryan, myself and the guest bloggers we’ve had thus far believe in agile hardware development so we haven’t spend much time talking about why agile hardware wouldn’t work. No surprise there. But when you’re getting a steady diet of opinions from one side of an argument, it can be easy to forget that there can be some very practical arguments on the flip side to the coin. Today – after a little cajoling from Bryan over the past year – Mike Thompson from Huawei in Ottawa brings a little balance to AgileSoC.com by examining the flip side of the coin. Continue reading →

You’re Either With Me Or You’re With: The UVM Sequencer

Posted on by nosnhojn

Time for a new series of posts on agilesoc.com. I think it’ll be best to call this a series of challenges to the functional verification community at large. I’ll point out techniques that have irked me, wonder aloud why we use them and then challenge people to propose alternatives. The important part of this is not to agree or disagree with me (though obviously feel free to do either). What I’m hoping for is that people will stop and do a little navel gazing (aka: a powerful technique for fostering creative thinking that we don’t schedule nearly enough time for), to think a bit about what we do and why we do it. I’m sure some of these posts will come off as ranting which I’ll say from the outset I won’t be apologizing for! But I’m looking to get people talking, not put people on the defensive. These are meant as honest, constructive food-for-thought so keep that in mind as you’re reading.

Ready? It’s time to get heated! It’s time to get opinionated! It’s time to pick sides!!

You’re either with me, or you’re with: the UVM sequencer! Continue reading →

Quality Lag and Debug Lag with Constrained Random Verification

Posted on by nosnhojn

If you’ve read Does Constrained Random Verification Really Work and Functional Verification Doesn’t Have to be a Sideshow, you’ll know that I’ve become a bit of a skeptic when it comes to constrained random. My opinion hasn’t changed much since those posts and I think I’ve got a couple visuals that will help people see the point I was arguing in Functional Verification Doesn’t Have to be a Sideshow, that a successful constrained random verification effort starts with directed testing… a lot of directed testing. Continue reading →

Agile2012 Round-up: Day 4

Posted on by nosnhojn

It’s day 4 and time for an abbreviated post. Today I made it to the first session in the morning, hung around in the open space to listen in on some post-talk discussion and met some friends for lunch to talk about some open-source development.

But the big news of the day was that the final votes were counted and the winner of the Agile2012 Conference Gold Star Award for Outstanding Accidental Contribution To The Field Of Hardware Verification… or repeat winner would be more accurate… is Elisabeth Hendrickson! She was the big winner last year and she did it again this year by spending another hour with me today showing me how to use cucumber to write acceptance tests. She’s also helped get me thinking about the possibilities for next year’s conference so congratulations (and thank you :)). Continue reading →