Abstract
Testing is an important aspect of design and development which consumes significant time and resource in many companies. However, it has received less research attention than many other activities in product development, and especially, very few publications report empirical studies of engineering testing. Such studies are needed to establish the importance of testing and inform the development of pragmatic support methods. This paper combines insights from literature study with findings from three empirical studies of testing. The case studies concern incrementally developed complex products in the automotive domain. A description of testing practice as observed in these studies is provided, confirming that testing activities are used for multiple purposes depending on the context, and are intertwined with design from start to finish of the development process, not done after it as many models depict. Descriptive process models are developed to indicate some of the key insights, and opportunities for further research are suggested.
Highlights
Numerous models of engineering design and development processes present them as sequences or networks of tasks (Wynn and Clarkson 2018)
We argue that this is an important gap, because a number of researchers have reported that testing is a very significant cost factor in engineering design and development (Tahera et al 2017)
The literature study undertaken for this paper supports earlier comments by Engel (2010) that relatively little work has been published on testing in this specific context, as well as the observation of Lévárdy et al (2004) that testing has received significantly less research attention than the associated design and analysis tasks of product development and systems engineering
Summary
Numerous models of engineering design and development processes present them as sequences or networks of tasks (Wynn and Clarkson 2018). From the point of view of testing, these process models are partial in the activities that they depict, and in their structures which typically do not emphasise the relationships between design and testing We argue that this is an important gap, because a number of researchers have reported that testing is a very significant cost factor in engineering design and development (Tahera et al 2017). The literature study undertaken for this paper supports earlier comments by Engel (2010) that relatively little work has been published on testing in this specific context, as well as the observation of Lévárdy et al (2004) that testing has received significantly less research attention than the associated design and analysis tasks of product development and systems engineering. Software testing is not the main focus of this paper, the literature on this topic is, mentioned where appropriate to support the discussion
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