SmarteSoft

There was a time in the semiconductor industry where the test assets created during the process were not re-used.  This meant that test engineers were forced to start from scratch each time they developed and implemented a test plan. To make matters worse, there was a giant wall between design and test teams.

There are a number of reasons why this wall was there but, for the most part, it persisted thanks to the very different ways in which design engineers and test engineers then approached their job. As a result, the way in which such accompanying technologies as simulators and programmable test equipment worked echoed the split between design and test. These differences were of course driven by the specific needs and focus of each test environment, a situation which resulted in test data being structured completely differently for designers than it was for testers.

To this day, this difference in mind-set and the way test data is represented persists, but the SemiCon industry has realized the value of design-to-test re-use and has found ways to bridge this gap. The result?  An entire support industry that specializes in technologies designed to convert test data from the formats used by design engineers to a format that can be used by test engineers. This conversion is often an extremely complex task, but tools and methodologies have evolved to the point where re-use of design test data by test engineers is the norm throughout the industry, and has resulted in dramatic savings in test engineering costs and reductions in time-to-market for products that are often characterized by an extremely small market window.  While the wall is still very much intact for now, the results seen here still represented a dramatic, positive shift in the way technology firms view the separation between design and test. As such, it should serve as an example for the high tech sector.

At SmarteSoft, we’re taking the lessons learned in the semiconductor industry and applying them to the wall that divides software development teams from the QA folks who test their applications. With such revolutionary products as SmarteStudio (look for a full release in September) and the forthcoming SmarteScript 6.0, our clients will find themselves suddenly able to integrate development and QA, cutting both costs and time to market, thus improving their ROI. In ten years this may well be the norm. For now, you can only find such revolutionary implementation here.