The Making of VIVID A Software Engineering Perspective

This paper is about the software engineering facets of the making of a large programming systems product for symbolic VLSI CAD called VIVID. Issues such as how teams were organized, how conceptual integrity was maintained, and portability are discussed. Specific tools are also described that were built to aid in the development of VIVID. Methods are explored that aid in managing large systems with many directories and huge numbers of files. Finally, techniques for debugging such a large system are discussed. This paper's goal is to share these tools, techniques and methods to improve the software engineering practices used by all developers of CAD as well as other large software systems.