How Do Verification Engineers Waste 2 Hours, 52 Minutes, 48 Seconds a Day?

If you need a good way to waste 36% or your day, debugging code is your best bet!

That’s what I figured Thursday while listening to Harry Foster’s analysis of the 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Survey commissioned by Mentor Graphics. The survey is meant to show design and functional verification trends from hardware development. It’s well done and well presented by Harry.

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More AgileSoC? Are You Kidding Me?

AgileSoC.com is an idea that Bryan Morris and I started about 2 years ago after a few long conversations at SNUG San Jose in 2009. Bryan had been interested in agile software development for a while, I was completely new to it. Even though I didn’t know anything about agile, it didn’t take long for me to buy into the idea that it made sense. A lot of what happens in hardware development, particularly in the front-end design and verification, is pretty similar to what the software guys do. Sure the packaging and delivery is different (to varying degrees depending on what your target technology is) but there are a lot of day-to-day activities that are similar. In the last couple years, I’ve heard many people say that agile “makes sense”. I think those people are right.

Admittedly, I have a pretty short span of attention so I was interested to see how long I’d stay interested. I figured 6 months or so and I’d start to wear out. Turns out I was wrong.

We presented our first paper titled A Giant, Baby Step Forward: Agile Techniques for Hardware Design at SNUG Boston in the fall of 2009. That was about 90% book report and 10% practice/observation. It was good for a first crack but I think we did better at SNUG San Jose 2010 with Agile IC Development With Scrum. We have video of both presentations here. In between, I did a presentation to a group of software developers at a Calgary APLN meeting in Nov 2009. That was a little stressful because it was my first time talking to people that know and use agile. Since then we’ve had 2 articles posted in the Mentor Graphics Verification Horizons newsletter, Agile Transformation In IC Development and Agile Transformation In Functional Verification. We’ve also had entries in the Cadence community blogs, a nice write up by Richard Goering and a guest entry that I put together.

Time has passed and we have we’ve been writing articles pretty steadily. It’s been 2 years and if anything, my interest has grown. As of now, we have 17 articles posted on AgileSoC.com by 4 authors. The number of articles slowly grows as we stumble into new ideas and find the time to put them together.

And now, for some reason, I think I need a blog so I can spend more time on this stuff. I shake my head as I type that but here I am anyway. My first guess is that this will be an informal dumping ground for ideas and/or experiences that aren’t good enough to support “real” articles on their own. Not entirely sure so I’ll start with that and see where things end up!