Empowering test engineering

While test engineering has been busy creating better and more comprehensive tests in response to an ever more complex set of electronics, its status as a profession has steadily declined. The notion that test engineering is necessary, beneficial and an economically valuable part of delivering and supporting a good product is not always recognized by management and thus the profession lacks status and empowerment. This extends to military organizations that have demoted standards having to do with test: MIL-STD-2165, the Design for Testability (DFT) military standard has been relegated to MIL-HDBK-2165, Test Program Set (TPS) development military standard MIL-STD-2077 has been replaced by MIL-PRF (preferred)-32070, and ATEs, such as CASS and IFTE have been preselected for test organizations. Without empowerment, test engineers serve other organizations with a variety of priorities. This is not efficient and often compromises the test engineering mission. Test engineering serves a noble cause of its own, which creates value and profit for the company. We demonstrate the economics paradigm and suggest that empowerment will follow when test engineering is considered to be an investment rather than expenditure. As a profit center, an empowered test engineering department and its test engineers need to be masters of their missions as well as of their destiny. To accomplish that, we explore how the four management functions of Planning, Organizing, Controlling and Leading can be incorporated into the test engineering department. We detail the management tasks and argue that the proper management of a value-added test engineering department can bring about a greater empowerment for its test engineers. At the same time, only an empowered test engineering department can accomplish these tasks.