Test Engineering - A Heretics Perspective

When most people hear the words 'Test'; the sphincter puckers and instant memories of end of year math tests from school days break the hands in sweat.
Nope.. not that kind of test.

Some folk in the I.T world recognise them as the guys who melt down racks of servers and get frustrated at developers whenever they say.. "Works on my machine"
Getting warm..

Manufactures then stick their hands up (eager to participate) then point to .. a box full of wires and stuff, a few gauges and a GPIB port in a peculiar place.
Its true, there's a competitive game of coming up with the most 'what-the?' prototype, damn sure of it.
They then puff out their chests and proclaim "We made five of these in 7 months"
The production team giggle and whisper "re-work the whole thing twice more and we could make 500 a day"
At that point the marketing team break out in sweat as they promised the investors 5,000,000 before summer.
Yeah, Yeah.. warmer..

Software guys lean back in state of the art pneumatically adjusted chairs replete in the best designs from Denmark fully trusting there will be another version to release when the Analysts finish yet another round of 'Regression'.
Oh.. still warmer still..

Accountant turns to rocket scientist "Is all this test stuff necessary ? Two O-Rings should be enough"
Yeah .. this kind of testing should be left to the experts but sadly significant numbers of failure are ..lets say 'Clerical' in nature.
Hot Hot hot !! beeep beeep

I'm a Test Engineer with some of the most diverse experience in the fields of electronics manufacturing, high volume consumer goods, banking systems, telco network performance, Streaming Video on Demand and Bionics,, and have formed a decidedly heretical set of design patterns used in some rather successful startups.
Their successes (and a fair bit of failure) were based on 'out-there' 'lets not do it like the others' mindsets.

Stick around .. there's always more.