Why You Should Go to an Agile Software Conference

Posted on by nosnhojn

It’s that time of year again and people are scrambling to put together conference proposals, with fingers crossed, for the annual Agile Conference in August. This year it’s Agile2013 in Nashville and I, like the others, am scrambling.

Screen Shot 2013-01-22 at 8.58.39 PMI have 2 proposals in this year. Just like the last couple years, the open and interactive submission system has been great for tuning my proposals. Unlike the last couple years, there seems there’s nowhere for a hardware fella to hide. No Embedded Agile stage. No Emerging Applications of Agile stage. This year we’ve been thrown in with the big dogs and it’s getting a tad harder to appear relavent. Continue reading →

Property-Driven Development in Hardware

Posted on by nosnhojn

So this is one of those posts where after a short conversation with a colleague, something jumps into my head and I end up asking myself I wonder if this makes sense? The idea has to do with formal verification, which is not my area of expertise, so I figured the best thing for me to do is just get it out. From there, real experts can discuss whether or not it makes sense (or maybe it’s something experts already do in which case I’m late to the party and would appreciate somebody straightening me out :)). Continue reading →

My Commitment to Agile Hardware Development

Posted on by nosnhojn

IMG292You’re in a training course. It’s noon on Friday and more than four days have just flown by. You’ve covered several different topics; some you like and some you don’t. A few you want to start using; others not so much. You’ve learned a lot of new things and it’s been a great week. On Monday though you’re going to get thrown into the deep end, all by yourself, where you’ll need to apply your new knowledge. What do you do?

This is what we did.

In early December I delivered a week of hardware TDD training. It was a good week with lots of questions and discussion (not to mention a lot of TDD’ing). At the conclusion of the week, we needed a way to help the team take what we practiced and carry it over to the following Monday and beyond. We had a few choices: Continue reading →

Behaviour Driven Development for Circuit Design and Verification

Posted on by nosnhojn

Coming away from Agile2012, the technique that really opened my eyes was behaviour driven development. In my daily conference reports, you saw that there were 2 talks that I found exceptionally interesting. I like the idea and think BDD is another technique we hardware folks can learn from.

After having had my eyes opened to BDD at the conference, it was a nice coincidence that I was able to arrange a chat with Melanie Diepenbeck, Mathias Soeken, Daniel Große and Rolf Drechsler from the University of Bremen in Germany. We found we had a mutual interest in BDD and they were nice enough to arrange a Skype call to share some of the work they’ve been doing. Continue reading →

I’m Not Anti-Constrained Random…

Posted on by nosnhojn

I’m anti-constrained random. I would never use constrained random. I think it’s an overhyped technique that doesn’t produce the results we think it does. People would be better off forgetting about it and going back to directed testing.

Ok… a little strong perhaps, but if you’ve read my posts (aka: rants) on constrained random verification, you may be assuming that’s what I think of it; that constrained random is something I’m opposed to and that I’ve turned back the clock to the directed testing stone ages.

Not true.
Continue reading →

Hammock Driven Design

Posted on by Bryan Morris

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.

Continue reading →