An engineered testing strategy: part I: enhanced balance between analytic and hardware

An important phase of any product development process is design optimisation and validation. This phase ensures through a predetermined testing strategy that the product failure modes are studied and addressed. The analytical and hardware type of testing present the engineering community with a selection. However, inherent deficiencies exist in each one. Hardware tests are long, expensive and have moderate-to-good correlation to field. Analytical modelling and simulation are quicker at the component level but moderately correlated and time-consuming at the system level. The challenge of executing appropriate testing necessitates the need for a balanced and engineered testing strategy to support product development process timing. This paper illustrates the need for a testing strategy through an example and provides the mechanics on how to deliver a balanced strategy to improve either analytical or hardware testing for better and more correlated tests. A business case for this need is also presented.