INCREASE THE VALUE OF YOUR VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION TEST TEAM

Three factors needs to be considered if you want to drive more business value through your test team: data, systems, and processes. Companies that get these three factors right can realize large gains not only in their validation test teams but also in upstream and downstream functions as designs are iterated on faster and delivered to manufacturing for mass production sooner.

For the longest time, the act of testing products has been seen as an unavoidable expense in the product development cycle. At a high level, the reason companies test are (1) to make sure the product is developed according to specification by testing it against a set of requirements and (2) to run through intended use scenarios to make sure it functions as described by product management and R&D. Looking at it from that perspective, it is easy to see why many organizations work to identify how few features they can test on a new product and still deliver it to market with good quality (the test coverage challenge). This might have worked somewhat in the past, but in the current world, market windows are shrinking while the number of competitors is increasing.

Why the Status Quo Needs to Change

Shorter market windows and more competitors pose two problems. First, the shorter market window puts more pressure on V&V teams, who often have to make quality tradeoffs to save time and hope that the product is still acceptable. Second, technology is advancing faster, so companies need to test for additional scenarios that they haven’t had to test for in the past. From a competition perspective, even established companies are finding that small startups can pose a big threat. Increased competition means not only that customers have more options but also technology advancements are helping new companies enter a market that might otherwise be considered unattractive. New entrants might also have a higher quality product because they have smaller product portfolios to manage. Established companies can lose market share to new competitors who can integrate new features and technology, get their product to market faster, and do all this without compromising quality

Today, many companies are trying to solve these issues through various initiatives, but only a few companies realize how much value can come from looking at their V&V test teams. Even though the V&V teams are part of a cost center, they can offer real gains in operational efficiency and increase product value. To enable test teams to add more business value, companies need to optimize their teams’ workflows and operational processes, examine how the team builds and manages their systems, and identify what insights can be derived from their test data. When doing so, they can identify and share relevant information upstream with R&D and downstream with manufacturing to capitalize on efficiency gains across the organization, breaking down traditional silos. The status quo has to change by making data, systems, and process improvements to increase the overall business value V&V teams add to companies.

The Power of Data: Setting Up Teams for Success

The product design process creates a vast amount of data that, if managed correctly, can provide valuable insights into how a product will perform. This is the test data acquired while testing the product; however, companies also have data on the state of the system, who performed the test, and which instruments were used during the test. Maybe your organization captures all that data, or maybe it captures some of it. Either way, step 1 is determining what you want to learn from the data. That, in turn, helps you determine which data you need to collect to gain the insights you are seeking. V&V is about product performance and understanding not only if a product performs to specification but also why it does or doesn’t meet the specified requirements. If you understand why, then you can accelerate the iterations as you feed this information back to R&D and design engineers, who can solve the problem faster. Once you have defined which data you want to capture, you need a strategy to handle data coming from validation test benches. You can think of this data as the raw data that, depending on your strategy, can be both test and system data. However, just capturing it is not enough. You need to start with the end in mind, so after you have defined which insights you want to derive from your data, the next step is setting up a data pipe. This process defines how you ingest, govern, and transform data into something meaningful that can provide business context. The faster you can ingest data, the more real-time information you can derive from it to make decisions. You can also speed up the process if you’re notified in real time where a fix is needed and which test needs to be rerun. In this case, the earlier you’re notified, the less time you waste testing a product that will not pass a long-running test. A