Page 14 - Building A Succesful Board-Test Strategy

CHAPTER

What Is a Test Strategy?

This book examines various board-test techniques, relating how they fit into an
overall product design/manufacturing/test strategy. It discusses economic, man-
agement, and technical issues, and attempts to weave them into a coherent fabric.
Looking at that fabric as a whole is much more rewarding than paying too close
attention to any individual thread. Although some of the specific issues have
changed in the past few years, the basic principles remain relatively constant,
Printed-circuit boards do not exist in a vacuum. They consist of components
and electrical connections and represent the heart of electronic systems. Compo-
nents, boards, and systems, in turn, do not spring to life full-blown. Designers
conceive them, manufacturing engineers construct them, and test engineers make
sure that they work. Each group has a set of tools, criteria, and goals. To be
successful, any test strategy must take all of these steps into account.
Test managers coined the briefly popular buzzword "concurrent engineering"
to describe this shared relationship. More recently, enthusiasm for concurrent engi-
neering has waned. Yet the ideas behind it are the same ones that the test industry
has been touting for as long as anyone can remember. The term represents merely
a compendium of techniques for "design-for-marketability," "design-for-manu-
facturability," "design-for-testability," "design-for-repairability," and so on. The
fact that the term "concurrent engineering" caught on for awhile was great. A
company's overall performance depends heavily on everyone working together.
Regardless of what you call it, many manufacturers continue to follow "design-for-
whatever" principles. For those who do not understand this "we are all in it
together" philosophy, a new term for it will not help.
Concurrent engineering boils down to simple common sense. Unfortunately,
as one basic law of human nature so succinctly puts it, "Common sense isn't." In
many organizations, for example, each department is responsible only for its own
costs. Yet, minimizing each department's costs does not necessarily minimize costs
across an entire project. Reducing the costs in one department may simply push
them off to someone else. Achieving highest efficiency at the lowest cost requires
that all of a project's participants consider their activities' impact on other depart-
ments as well as their own.