Startup spotlight: Verifyter

8/24/2012 10:40 AM EDT

I always love it when I get to learn about a new company, a start-up with a vision for the future, something that hasn’t been tried before. I got to do that again this week with a Swedish company called Verifyter. As you can probably guess by the name, they are involved with verification, but only indirectly. More specifically they are trying to improve and automate the bug triage process.

Verifyter was founded in 2010 with a mission of transforming the development process by automating the diagnosis of software and hardware failures. They observed that until now, diagnosis has been performed manually, keeping engineers busy and preventing them from taking on new and more interesting challenges. Verifyter has dedicated themselves to freeing engineers from this chore, allowing them to focus on the bigger picture.

So what sort of pedigree do they have? Let’s start with the chairman of the board.

Lars-Eric Lundgren, who was founder and CEO of HARDI Electronics AB in Sweden. HARDI created a modular, LEGO-like system for ASIC-prototyping called HAPS. HARDI was acquired by Synplicity in 2007 which was itself acquired by Synopsys the following year and Synopsys has continued to actively develop this technology as part of its verification strategy.

Daniel Hansson is the CEO. He was an ASIC designer and project manager in Ericsson, ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments and ARC. Daniel has worked on regression test flows with patents granted in the pipeline.

PinDown is the product which they claim is an open and scalable solution for test management, regression test automation and automated bug analysis. In their view, taking a bug-centric approach rather than a test-centric approach enables users to diagnose and fix issues quickly and productively. They have an integrity check mechanism that separates test environment issues, such as server and network failures, from actual test failures, thus further improving productivity and reliability.

They say that PinDown’s diagnosis capabilities automatically analyzes every test, build and configuration failure and trace it back to the exact revision in the version control system where each specific failure was introduced. The diagnosis algorithm is based on re-running selected tests on a minimum number of earlier revisions in order to conclude when the failure was introduced.

I talked with Daniel and asked about customers. They do have an early customer – Synopsys. I asked for more information about how they were using it. Daniel told me that they are not allowed to give any more details, but it seems reasonable to conclude that it would be either in the services group or the IP group. Daniel is also preparing a design article to talk about this technology in more detail, and I hope to be able to bring that to you in the near future.

More information can be found about them at http://verifyter.com/