Do You Really Want Zero Test Costs?

By EETimes

October 5, 2015

Eliminating test, and thus its cost, might seem like a good strategy, but it will hurt in the long run.

As a test engineering consultant, I often receive calls from clients who want to reduce their test costs. Is this the correct goal and are their test expenditures really excessive? My clients think they want to transform the "expensive test" into a "low cost test." What they really want is satisfied customers receiving fault free products at the lowest possible cost. While test is a factor in the overall cost of delivering good products, so are the cost of repair and the penalty cost incurred from selling bad products.

Wouldn't you love to have no failures and produce the perfect product that would work the first time and every time? In that ideal world, you wouldn't need test and thus no test costs. Because we don't yet live in manufacturing utopia, "No Test" has its own cost in added repair and penalty costs.

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