Root Cause Your Regression Failures Faster with Verisium PinDown

What Is PinDown?

In simple terms, Verisium PinDown helps you identify the specific code commits that caused your regression failures. It does this by building AI models of source code changes, test reports, and log files to predict which source code check-ins are most likely to have introduced which failures and automatically fix them.

PinDown is part of the Verisium Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Driven Verification Platform, which optimizes verification workloads, boosts coverage, and accelerates the root cause analysis of bugs. In this debug and analysis space, Cadence offers several AI-powered verification tools: Verisium WaveMiner, AutoTriage, AutoFocus, CodeMiner, and PinDown. These tools assist at all stages of the analysis and debug process, reducing the time spent debugging by up to 10X.

Figure 1: Cadence Verisium Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Driven Platform

When Should PinDown Be Used?

Let's say you ran a couple of regressions, one last week and one this week, and in between, there were many check-ins from multiple users. The recent regression had some failures introduced due to one or more of those check-ins since the previous regression. You do not have any intermediate regression results to quickly identify the culprit changelist. The typical debug cycle would involve creating builds with multiple changelists and executing the failing test with each build to identify the culprit changelist, a long and tedious process. Verisium PinDown not only automates this debug process but also accelerates it, using AI to quickly get to the failing changelist and identify the specific piece of code that caused the failure.

Check out this video (Cadence customer credentials required) showcasing the automatic bug localization flow using Verisium PinDown.

Figure 2: Verisium PinDown risk prediction for changelists

Verisium PinDown Flows

The Verisium PinDown flow for identification of the culprit changelist causing failures requires you to use Verisium Manager (formerly vManager). This Cadence tool facilitates the basic, everyday tasks of the verification process, such as firing regressions, analyzing, and rerunning failures. There are two associated flows depending on how or at what stage you want to use Verisium Manager:

1. PinDown flow using Verisium Manager as a runner: This flow assumes that your regressions have been fired using Verisium Manager. You can check out the details of this flow, as well as go through demo slides to see the step-by-step process of identifying the failing changelist in the following Rapid Adoption Kits (RAK) available on the Cadence Learning and Support Portal: Introduction to PinDown using vManager as a runner (RAK)
   
2. PinDown flow using a generic (non-Verisium Manager) runner: This flow assumes that your regressions have been fired using a generic regression runner. In this case, you will use the Verisium Manager capabilities to collect the regression results. Check out the flow details in the following RAK available on Cadence Learning and Support Portal: Introduction to PinDown with vManager Collect flow (RAK)

To summarize the key benefits, use Verisium Pindown to predict where bugs are without running any tests using its AI capabilities, identify and fix bugs faster, and get detailed failure reports.

Learn More

To download new RAKs as they become available, please keep visiting the RAK page in the Cadence Learning and Support Portal (account needed), your 24/7 partner, for help resolving issues related to Cadence software or learning Cadence tools and technologies. Happy Learning!