The next lecture in the Design for Manufacturing course is about Test Design and will be taught by Dragon Innovation‘s VP of Manufacturing and Engineering, Bill Drislane. The presentation was given in conjunction with the Quality lecture.

There are two kinds of testing: design verification testing and production testing.

For design verification testing, you’re using a prototype as an embodiment of a design and testing it. A prototype’s functionality will be the minimum function of the final design quality. If your prototype meets the requirements than the final design will meet the requirement as well. There are some issues around manufacturability and assembly that will not always come out of prototype testing. If you’re saying “Yes, this prototype of a car can go 200 MPH”  and if your rough prototype does it, then the design will be good. You typically test small numbers, as you just want to know that the design fundamentally works.

And then there’s production testing. Production testing is about making sure that one million units in a row all meet the design spec and intent and that one unit after another are just like each other. One person should be able to buy two widgets in a row with no difference between them; that is reliable and that it does what is expected.

Design verification and production testing are two fundamentally different challenges.

You can watch the full lecture with the accompanying slides below.

Video by Williamson Visuals

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+