Testbench quality improvement: Cleaning test bench

First step in the test bench quality rehaul is cleaning the test bench code.

Clean compile and run time warnings

Review the compile warnings from the compile log file. This should be done periodically. Some of the compile warnings can turn into bugs later.

Review the runtime warnings. It could be possible some constraints might be failing and not getting caught because it’s not checked, some of the checks downgraded from error to warning and forgotten to be re enabled and any simulator tool warnings.

In fact it’s best to add the check on the compile and run time warnings as part of the check-in regression to keep it under control.

Cleaning redundant files

Some of temporary files created during development which are no longer useful can accumulate over time.

For source code, it’s best to compare the the file list reported by simulators with the files in the development directories containing the simulatable code. If it’s not useful or applicable better to get rid of it and lighten the development trees. It helps save the disk spaces for the development trees going forward and saves times for while searching something in code.

Cleaning dead code

Dead tests, test bench code and coverage has elimination is the goal of this step. Code coverage of the test bench could be one of the automatic way to help spot these codes. If not it has to be driven by the reviews.