Verification Planning Made Easy

Submitted By MDV Team Member - Paul Carzola
Lead Consulting Engineer, Verification

If you're looking for a really easy way to create an executable verification plan, you need take a look at Enterprise Planner, which is a licensed feature of Incisive Enterprise Manager.  Enterprise Planner allows you to easily create, edit and maintain verification plans, either starting from scratch, or by linking and tracking to your functional specifications.  What's really nice is being able to incrementally create a plan that you execute and see immediate results, or alternatively having multiple people to contribute to various sections of a comprehensive plan concurrently - both approaches are used extensively by users of Enterprise Planner.

For those of you who are not familiar with Enterprise Planner, it's basically a user friendly and intuitive GUI based application used to create executable functional verification plans in a format that can be consumed by Enterprise Manager.  What makes it special is that users can take their specifications and connect important areas back to the plan for tracking purposes, allowing Enterprise Planner to detect specification changes.  Enterprise Planner can also map the various metrics from functional coverage, code coverage, assertions and dedicated tests back to the plan.  From here, Enterprise Manager, our core technology for driving Metric Driven Verification, can read in the plan and report real time results with color bars and percentages, so you can see the immediate status of your verification project.  Enterprise Planner and Enterprise Manager are both proven products, but the new updates have incorporated a number of ease of use features.  This latest release is included as part of the INCISIVE 9.2 software release, which was made available to users in October.

So what have we improved in this version?

We've made connecting with the specification a lot easier by allowing users to develop their plans in both Windows and Linux.  Simply load the specification in Enterprise Planner (EP) and create verification plan (vPlan) elements based on important areas that you would like to see verified.  It's as simple as pulling up the spec in EP and highlighting with the mouse the areas in the spec you think are important.  From here you can create a section or planned coverage element that will track changes with future versions of the spec.  Detecting spec changes became easier as well by allowing you to update your spec and seeing the difference in a side by side comparison between the old spec and the new spec.  

Enterprise Planner showing Specification Synchronization
(Click on image to enlarge)

As with previous versions of EP, you are able to easily map any combination of metrics to the vPlan sections from our wide variety of solutions such as functional coverage, code coverage and assertion coverage and checks to name a few.  We've taken coverage mapping a bit further by showing you, graphically, what has been mapped already and what still needs to be mapped allowing you to see what coverage elements are not included in the plan.

As with developing reusable verification components you will also want to develop reusable verification plans as well and for similar reasons.  Our planning technology allows you to easily create and use verification plans at variable hierarchies or to easily build verification plans that reference other verification plans.  For 9.2, we made developing reusable verification plans easier than before.  Whether you're someone who is developing the reusable plans or someone who is using them, you will find that our new push button interface makes it a snap to do.

If you have not adopted a Metric Driven Verification approach using an executable plan there's never been a better time to easily gain visibility and control of your verification process and shave months off of manual verification plan creation.  If you have adopted an MDV approach but are still creating verification plans without Enterprise Planner you will find that using Enterprise Planner will allow you to create a plan within hours instead of days or weeks and make verification planning much more enjoyable.  For those using an older version of Enterprise Planner you'll find the new 9.2 version will most likely double your productivity in creating vPlans.  

So no matter if you're new to verification planning or you're currently using our planning technology, I encourage you to take a look at the new capabilities in Enterprise Planner 9.2!