Trends in test – part two
23 June 2011
In this four-part series, National Instruments draws upon its experience of a wide range of industries to provide a comprehensive look at key technologies and methodologies impacting the test and measurement industry in 2011. In this second instalment we discuss the required focus on people, processes and technology in order to successfully integrate validation and production test.
Right now, even as you read this article, organisations throughout the electronics design and manufacturing industry are improving the integration of their test teams to gain a competitive edge.
This integration strategy stands in stark contrast to the conventional practice of improving test by segmenting design and production teams and allowing them to evolve independently. While small or fledgling test organisations might be well integrated as a result of their limited team size, larger test organisations mostly follow strategies that improve teams separately.
The shift towards test integration is highlighted by a worldwide test manager survey, which found that the top goal for 45% of test organisations was to increase reuse between validation and production. Therefore, the boundaries drawn between these traditionally independent groups are fast becoming blurred.
In order to meet increasingly tight product development schedules, production test teams are forced to embed themselves in the product development process. Similarly, validation test teams are spending increasingly more time debugging designs using production test systems on the manufacturing floor. By formalising the ad-hoc relationship between these teams, companies are reducing time to market by accelerating test development.
In the past, technology reuse has been impeded by the significant differences between validation and production test tools. However, the increased use of automation across both groups has facilitated the sharing of standardised software and instrumentation. Application Development Environments (ADE) and Test Executives, such as NI LabVIEW and NI TestStand, have been designed specifically for automation and straightforward hardware integration. These kinds of software tools are more than capable of meeting diverse validation and production test requirements. Furthermore, software defined-instrumentation, such as National Instruments’ PXI-based Modular Instruments, provide all the power and flexibility to facilitate a single, standardised hardware platform. Ultimately, technology reuse through a common set of tools leads to simplified hardware redundancy strategies, consolidated training and the price benefits of volume purchasing.
From a business perspective, aligning test integration objectives with high-level business goals will help to gain executive-level support. Securing backing from executive leadership simplifies the resources and political capital necessary to accomplish the project. In turn, this will free-up test managers to concentrate on improving processes that historically threw products ‘over the wall’ from design to test.
Finally, it is important to remember that integrating test has a strong people element that must be addressed. Although engineers generally consider themselves to be fundamentally rational people, this level-headedness occasionally ends at the coding office. Software written by unfamiliar developers is often met with scepticism and doubt, resulting in excessive rewrites of working code. Mark Keith, Chief Test-Software engineer at Honeywell, articulated this challenge when he said: “Engineers will not use code from people they don’t trust.” Therefore, building personal relationships between the validation and production teams is paramount.
Best-in-class organisations have employed different strategies for improved relationships between their test teams, depending on the level of change that is possible in each organisation. If test teams report to the director leading the integration project, one trend has been to merge production test into the design and validation groups. However, making such far-reaching changes is beyond the control of some managers. In this situation, smaller changes, such as implementing a rotation programme, have also proven to be effective.
Much like any complex business problem, improving organisational test integration requires an understanding of the necessary changes to people, processes and technology. Ultimately, taking a comprehensive, holistic approach to integration is critical to its success.
Richard Roberts is Technical Marketing Engineer, National Instruments UK & Ireland
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