A Good Plan, Plus Automation, Plus the Right Tools, Equals...Useful.

Last spring, my wife and I decided to take a family vacation to Hawaii this February, which coincidentally is just before DVCon. We're celebrating several family milestones, including our 20th anniversary, my son's 18th birthday and my father-in-law's 80th, so we're all going. As I've mentioned before, my wife is great at planning and managing things like this, and there are many similarities between planning a vacation and managing a verification project. As we know, having a plan is critical to a project's success, so my endearingly "old-school" wife has all of our plans written out in a document, which she'll print out and bring with us. As a "tool guy," I showed her an app I use that will automatically load all our confirmation emails into a cool interactive itinerary. It's great to have a plan, but automation and tools are what make the plan into something usable. You'll see this theme throughout the following articles.