An effective, cost-efficient quality and testing strategy must be based on clearly-defined requirements. Requirements help you specify the exact functionality of a product and guarantee that it is tested correctly and completely. Furthermore, compliance standards emphasise the need to prove links between higher-level and lower-level requirements and the implementation of requirements in the product. Proper documentation and reporting is also essential at all stages. So engineers are increasingly using requirements management tools to make the process of storing and analysing the requirements cost-efficient, and to ensure that the testing of automotive electronics is completely integrated with the rest of the product lifecycle.
Such tools completely link the development and verification documents to formal requirements stored in documents and databases, perform coverage and impact analysis, graphically display coverage relationships, and generate comprehensive reports.
To sum up
Test engineers in the automotive industry are challenged to increase test system performance while decreasing the system size to reduce the total cost of design, production and validation test. Conscious switch to a modular, software-defined approach is helping engineers to realise these goals.
Satish Mohanram is a technical marketing manager at National Instruments, India
