Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference – Part 2

2013-04-17 18.19.43Great final day at the Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference. It started with a keynote talk by Jim Tremlett of Rally, I had morning talk and an afternoon talk and filled in the rest of the time with hallway discussion. As always happens to me during an agile conference week, I’m tired and my head hurts. That was compounded by me giving 2 talks in the same day which I’ve never done before. But I made it and now it’s time to crash. But first… Continue reading

Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference – Part 1

So pretend you’ve dedicated about 5 years to something you believe in… I mean really believe in. At the beginning it seems like you’re the only person in on it (or 1 of 2 in my case considering Bryan was the guy that gave me the first little push). It seems to make so much sense but you can’t figure out why others haven’t seen it already. Then slowly… very slowly… you see people pop out of the woodwork from around the world. At times you get the feeling there’s a community being built, and that you’re a part of it, but it’s still so early that it’s not entirely clear who’s in your little community or where it even exists. Sometimes you question whether it actually exists at all… but you keep plugging away because you believe in it.

Then you spend a week in Hillsboro and find out that there are hundreds of people working toward the exact same thing you are.

Surprise! The agile hardware community does in fact exist. It’s a relief to actually see it :). Continue reading

Hammock Driven Design

I’ve been learning Clojure over the past few months. But that’s only slightly relevant to this post. As part of my learning process, I’ve been listening to recorded lectures from several Clojure conferences. There was one lecture by by Rich Hickey (creator of the Clojure language) called Hammock Driven Design which I found quite interesting. It’s about 40 minutes long, but I think it’s well worth a viewing.

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An Adherent Responds to the Heretic

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!

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Definition of Ready

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of having lunch with Alan Dunne from Alcatel-Lucent here in Ottawa.  Alan has commented on a couple of our AgileSoC blog posts in the past, and is a shining example of someone who has been using agile techniques with good results in his team’s FPGA development.  Over the years Alan has been diligently refining the typical software agile techniques for his FPGA team.  It was Alan that introduced me to the “definition of ready” (let’s call it DoR  from here on in).  A DoR is a corollary to the “Definition of Done” (aka DoD) which Neil blogged about a while ago (review it here http://www.agilesoc.com/2011/07/31/by-example-done-vs-done/).

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Happy New Year!

All the best to you and yours for 2012.

Neil and I want to wish everyone following AgileSoC a very Happy New Year!

AgileSoC has grown tremendously over the past year, and we’ve received many appreciative and insightful comments about what Neil and I are trying to do.

We look forward to 2012 — where our conversation with you about AgileSoC will continue to grow and develop.

Bryan & Neil

TDD for RTL

In this (very late) post, I attempt a look at why RTL designers should use Test Driven Development (TDD) to create each of their modules.

For this topic espeically, I’d like to hear your experiences with TDD, whether you think TDD is an appropriate methodology for RTL, and if you’ve been following along with our TDD-month(-and-a-half), whether you agree with Neil’s and my position that TDD is a great addition to our ASIC/FPGA development toolbox.

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TDD: Verification with SVUnit

Introduction

In my last posting, I gave a brief overivew of the SVUnit framework, and it’s usage model. This post will look at how to use this framework in your workflow: how it can be integrated into your existing verification methodology to help develop new verification components, and extend existing environments.

At this point, I’ll state that the key determinant for a successful introduction is attitude. The developers must see merit in using this approach, or at least trying the approach with an open mind. Otherwise, it will very likely not be successful.

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