We did our first UVM-UTest challenge on Friday. It went surprisingly well so now we’re going out on a limb by inviting others to take the challenge.

The “rules” of the challenge are:

• A team of 3 has one hour to break our unit tests (we used a lunch hour so it was like a lunch-n-learn… except it wasn’t boring).
• If a team can make functional changes to the uvm-1.1d library that our tests do not detect, you win. If our unit tests detect the functional changes you make, the unit tests win. Pretty simple.
• We guide you through the challenge so you know what code/classes you’re able to change (we also keep notes for where we can improve our test suite). Continue reading →

After less than a month of development, the open-source UVM-UTest project is ready for download by the masses. If you care about code quality and maintainability, you’ll be interested in what we have.

For instructions on how to download and run UVM-UTest, take a look at the UVM-UTest Getting Started page. If this is the first you’ve heard of UVM-UTest, you may also want to check out the original UVM-UTest announcement to see what we’re up to. In that announcement you’ll see links to the project charter and progress page. Also be sure to check out The Most Descriptive UVM Tests Ever Written. Those and others like it are part of today’s release.

The next step for us comes this Friday at Noon EST when we have our first UVM-UTest challenge. That’s where we challenge some of our colleagues to find holes in our unit test suite. If they can break the UVM library without our unit tests detecting it, they win. If our unit tests detect all the changes they make, we win. We’ll keep you posted on how that turns out!

..and of course… if you’re interested in taking the challenge, we’d be happy to hear from you :)!

-neil