( ESNUG 315 Item 9 ) ---------------------------------------------- [3/24/99]
Subject: ( ESNUG 313 #3 ) We Love Specman Before & After The "e" 3.0 Change
> [ Editor's Note: Recently, a Synopsys/VERA salesman (VERA is Specman's
> rival) told me that Verisity has fundamentally changed the Specman "e"
> language such that "e" 3.0 is no longer backward compatable with its
> pre-3.0 versions. The VERA salesman bragged that he was getting a good
> number of angry Specman customers switching over to VERA because of this
> lack of backward compatibility. Can any users out there confirm or deny
> Verisity did this and, if yes, has it had as dramatic an impact as this
> obviously biased Synopsys/VERA salesman is claiming? - John ]
From: Dave Tokic <davet@verisity.com>
John,
It looks like you got snookered by that VERA salesperson into posting a
question about old history! Verisity's production release of Specman Elite
(Specman 3.0) was back in June '98 (9+ months ago), with pre- production
versions out at customers 3-4 months earlier. In fact, we've currently
released version 3.1.2. At this point, 95% of the customers who were using
the 2.x versions have been successfully transitioned to the enhanced "e"
code for quite some time now. The process has generally gone smoothly and
customers have been happy with the transition and the very powerful
capabilities provided by the enhancements. Specific details and benefits
can be seen at: http://www.verisity.com/html/default_specmanelite.html
- Dave Tokic
Verisity Design Moutain View, CA
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From: "Greg Mokler" <greg.mokler@amd.com>
John,
I can throw in a few comments about the Specman 2.3 to 3.0 transition,
because we went through the process about 6 months ago.
It is true that the e code written for 2.3 is not completely compatible
with 3.0. For example, in order to make the language more object oriented,
3.0 imposed the requirement that all methods (Specman procedures) be owned
by a specific data structure. This made the converted code a bit ugly.
Verisity came in & used scripts they had written to convert our existing
2.3 code. There were problems related to the scripts as we were one of the
very first customers to make the transition, and the scripts were not very
robust, but in a matter of a week or so, the conversion was completed with
minimal impact to ongoing work.
This effort was inconsequential compared to the amount of time and work
we put into helping Verisity debug their new release; there were a number of
significant problems, and we probably lost a full month (very roughly) in
getting past them. The amount of time we spent on this was due largely to
the lack of local apps people to do the kind of handholding that was needed,
and the general lack of depth within their support department. These
problems are pretty typical for a small company, and, in my mind, have been
addressed quite adequately since that time: a local office now has 3 apps
people with good knowledge of the tool who have been very responsive.
I would like to stress that 3.0 was a major release and a significant
improvement over 2.3. From what I've seen over the past two years, Verisity
does not introduce backward compatibility issues as a matter of habit, and I
believe the improvements outweighed the effort involved. It added a number
of new features which have made the tool significantly more powerful: I
would not want to build another testbench without it!
The tool is quite stable now: the transition to 3.1 was uneventful,
despite the fact that a big chunk of the tool (the generator) was
completely rewritten. As things stand now, I would say that Verisity has
successfully put these problems behind them.
- Greg Mokler
AMD Communication Products Division Austin, TX
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