Why Test?

You’re a startup, medium sized business, large enterprise… and you’ve come out with the next generation product separating your company and self from the marketplace. A lot of momentum and thinking going towards:

“How can we get our product to market as quickly as possible, and to further separate ourselves from any competition?â€

“How do we scale our product from design, to protos, to pilots, and finally production ready?â€

“Are we setting up the correct operational and manufacturing plan to accommodate for our projected growth based on market demand?â€

And many more…

While the questions listed above (as well as many other questions not listed) are vitally important for businesses, some questions that may not always receive the same level of attention as others are:

“How does our test strategy look for this productâ€

or

“Do we feel confident that the product we are introducing into the marketplace in the next few months or year, is assembled correctly and functioning as we intend it to?

It’s important to factor in these test related questions as part of the overall go to market strategy, as without it, detrimental consequences in brand and market positioning can result.

SSP Insight

Being in business for 29 years, we have had the privilege of working with companies of all sizes and spanning many different industries.

Industries such as:

Automotive

Aviation

Defense

Enterprise computing devices

Medical devices

Semiconductors

Telecommunications

(Just to name a few)

Regardless of our customer makeup, we’ve realized that from one company to another, there’s a myriad of test strategies that exist, with each company having a different level of emphasis on test. 

While the importance of test may vary from company to company, the constant remains that test is a crucial step in a go-to-market strategy. It may be a competitive advantage for a company to get their product to market the fastest (especially when they’re offering an unrivaled product) ; however, it could lead to an even bigger problem if issues are found later on leading to recalls and scrap piles of failed product. This type of failure leads to major revenue setbacks, delayed product launches, and negative impact on brand reputation.

Therefore, it is important to think about how test can be incorporated early on in product development. This starts in the early stages of board design. The earlier test coverage and layout is taken into consideration, the more successful product builds are later with fewer failures due to higher test coverage.

Different Types of Test

Although many types of product testing exist such as:

-Manual cabling with multimeter
-Flying probe
-X-ray
-Etc.

For our blog, we’re primarily going to be digging deeper into Boundary Scan, In-Circuit Test, and Functional Test.

 In the future, we look forward to sharing future posts covering various: test topics and electronics topics, hobby projects,  and life at Solution Sources Programming. We hope you continue visiting our blog, and to learn more about our Company History, please follow this link.