Making Verification Methodology and Tool Decisions

By Hamilton Carter, Cadence Design Systems

This is the second of a three parts series. Part 1 can be found here

Are you itching to try a new methodology or technology to enhance your existing processes? Are you certain that management will resist change? Read on and learn how to use the new field of metric-driven engineering to objectively justify your decisions using automatically gathered data.

It happens all the time in engineering. A new process or methodology comes along. It looks attractive, your gut tells you this is the way to go, but adopting it requires one the big three 'scary' things:

• Risk (We've never done this before, will it work?)
• Cultural change (You want my designers to write assertions?)
• Spending money (Are you sure that tool will pay for itself?)

What you need to justify your decision are objectively measured results. Maybe you try the new technique on a pilot project and it works 'well'. But how do you quantify 'well' to upper management? You could keep detailed measurements of the time spent on each step of the new process. What a pain though! Simply measuring and recording the time used could significantly impact the effectiveness of the process. What if you could automatically measure the effectiveness of the new technique?