OVM Community Contributions: Wildly Popular And Clearly Essential

A couple of weeks ago, before going to bed one night I checked the statistics for the OVM World site. What I saw was really cool - exactly 10,000 registered users at the moment I looked! Being a social media guy these days, the first things I did was to tweet about it, and I was glad to see several re-tweets by OVM colleagues who also found this interesting and exciting.

My topic for today is another really cool thing I learned from the OVM World statistics: the OVM Community Contributions area is every bit as popular as the official OVM release kits. We introduced the Community Contributions area on OVM World about a year and a half ago as a way for anyone to contribute examples, ideas, suggestions for future OVM releases, etc.

We expected user interest, but I have to say that the response has exceeded my expectations. As I type this, the OVM World statistics tell me that there have been just over 24,000 downloads across all the contributions and just shy of 32,000 downloads across all versions of the OVM Kit. So the total contribution downloads are about 75% of the total kit downloads.

The first OVM kit was posted just over two years ago, and first contribution a year and half ago. So the the contributions area has been around roughly 75% of the time that kits have been available, leading to the conclusion that kits and contributions are essentially tied in terms of popularity. I must admit that I was a bit surprised (but delighted) by this result.

So what can we conclude? Clearly the Community Contributions area has played an essential role in the OVM ecosystem. No matter how quickly new features are added to official releases, users will come along with useful verification technology in between those releases. The contributions concept is a great way to keep the ecosystem dynamic and vital.

The statistics reinforce my stated position that I fully expect OVM World to continue even after the OVM has been standardized by Accellera as the UVM. Standards by their very nature do not get revised very frequently, so it will be essential for users to have a dynamic place for hot new verification technology that complements the UVM. OVM World will serve this need admirably.

Tom A.

The truth is out there...sometimes it's in a blog.