I have a usual go-to story for my most productive experience as a verification engineer. It happened a while ago, in the middle of my 10 year consulting stint. We were a 3-person team. I was the experienced one who knew about testbench infrastructure with a younger fella who knew about the product and a woman who was more of a firmware developer. We were verifying a medium-sized, complicated’ish subsystem that – as I remember it – included a faux processor that ran some custom instruction set.

The reason I’ve always considered this a good experience is because it’s an engagement where we took advantage of three, non-overlapping skill sets. From the very beginning, I was in charge of infrastructure (I think it was VMM at the time), young fella added most of the functionality (without knowing much VMM) and our dedicated firmware expert built out processing support. In lockstep, we’d roll out incremental additions to the infrastructure, fill in functional gaps, incorporate new FW support, run a test and repeat. Continue reading →