August 6, 2007 -- 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?
This is the second of a three parts series.
By Hamilton Carter. (Carter is the Senior Technical Leader for Verification at Cadence Design Systems, Inc.)
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
