Assertion clustering for compacted test sequence generation

Assertions are now widely used in verification as a means to help convey designer intent (as specification snippets) and also to simplify the detection of erroneous conditions by the firing of assertions. With this expressive modeling power, assertions can also be used for different tasks, such as helping to assess test coverage and even as a source for test generation. Our work deals with this last aspect, namely assertion based test generation. In this paper, we present our compacted test generation strategy based on assertions. Our compaction approach is experimentally evaluated using nearly three hundred assertions to show the amount of reduction that can be obtained in the size of the test sets. This ultimately has a positive impact on verification time, in the quest for bug free designs.