TDD And A New Paradigm For Hardware Verification

We’ve looked at why teams should consider doing TDD; we’ve looked at how the roles and responsibilities change between design and verification experts; now let’s look at when everything happens. This is the key to seeing how everything fits together.

Most teams nowadays chose to split their verification effort up as a combination of block level and top level testing. Block level testing is usually applied to every subsystem in a design and intended to exhaustively cover all the features of each subsystem. Once the block level testing is done, the exhaustively tested pieces are integrated and tested in a top level testbench.

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TDD In Hardware Development: Who Does What?

Welcome back for TDD month round 2! In our first post, Test Your Own Code!, we laid out some of the motivation for using TDD with some general discussion of the mechanics and benefits. If you read Test Your Own Code!, hopefully you’ve put some thought into where it actually fits into hardware process because that’s the topic we’re tackling today. I don’t think it’s trivial, but we can definitely squeeze TDD in. Here are my thoughts. Continue reading

Test Your Own Code! (I’ve Got Better Things To Do)

November is TDD month on AgileSoC.com. This is the first of a few installments where we look at the potential of Test Driven Development (TDD) in hardware development.

If you’re unfamiliar with TDD, the first and most obvious thing you’ll notice is that TDD breaks a boundary that many hardware teams – ASIC teams in particular – consider absolutely unbreakable.

With TDD, the person that writes the code, tests the code.

[Gasp]

Before you rattle off all the reasons why it doesn’t make sense for people to test their own code, let me give you some background and attempt to explain where we’re going, both in this post and with our wild scheme to introduce TDD to hardware engineers!

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November is TDD Month On AgileSoC.com

It’s the biggest thing we’ve done on AgileSoc.com to date. We’ve been planning it for a while. Finally it’s going to happen (in about a month from now)!

November is TDD month on AgileSoC.com

Starting November 1st, we’ll be taking a closer look at how test-driven development fits into hardware development. We’ll have an overview of TDD, give our opinions with respect to how it fits in to the development/verification paradigm most of us follow now and hopefully have a few examples and expert opinions. It’s 1 full month dedicated to TDD!

All this and more rolls out through the month of November so be sure to join the discussion!

-neil