The economics of harm prevention through Design for Testability

Design for testability (DFT) has been accepted as a cost saving approach in many applications. The rationale has been demonstrated in several papers by calculations showing how DFT benefits derived outweigh costs. In those cases benefits dealt with cost savings in producing, testing and deploying a product. Apparently, such benefits are bound by an upper limit as the savings could not be greater than the cost of making the product. In this paper, however, we model the revenue generation capability of a product through its life cycle and demonstrate that the impact on profits by poor quality products can be much greater. DFT can mitigate many of the causes for poor quality products. We provide examples of recent economic harm and disaster caused by defective electronics. For these examples we postulate what DFT could have done to mitigate the defects and how much money the companies could have saved if DFT prevented the problems. Benefits derived from DFT in the product life cycle combines with traditionally demonstrated DFT benefits in production, making DFT even more compelling.