Forgot about this in last week’s post! Another interesting question from the functional verification seminar I delivered in Mountain View a few weeks ago was: if you could only pick one or the other, would you rather use UVM or test-driven development? Of all the great questions that came up, that was by far the easiest to answer. My response…
I’d take TDD over UVM any day. No contest.
A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to do a lunch-n-learn seminar for about 20 verification engineers in Mountain View. It was an hour talk about an incremental approach to functional verification; one that I’ve given about a half a dozen times to various teams.
I like giving this talk because I find people on the whole are surprisingly receptive to the ideas. There’s also been some skepticism, though, that I’ve seen more than once. Seeing as how it’s still fresh in my mind, I figured now would be a good time to pass some of this skepticism on as food-for-thought. Continue reading
The point of the open-source UVM-UTest project we’ve been working on is to demonstrate how unit tests can be used to lock down the functionality of legacy code. Being able to run the unit tests means that when you’re changing code you can verify existing features won’t break during maintenance. We think that’s valuable. A nice side benefit of the project is that we can also show unit testing as being effective for increasing the quality of code hardware engineers write. How can we say that? Because over a 5 week period we found 10 defects in the UVM 1.1d release. Continue reading