Achieving tester independence

Currently, the cost of avionics testing is extremely high. Typically experienced testing costs-as high as 50 percent of the product´s cost-are a result of a continual need to reverse engineer at each stage in the product´s life cycle to obtain essential information necessary to accomplish testing and the relative inability to reuse information gained at one stage in similar situations during subsequent stages. The root cause of this limited reuse capability is the dependency of the Test Program Set (TPS) on a particular software language, instrument(s) and/or technology. This dependency is manifested by the inability to capitalize on previous investments. In turn, this inability to reuse the components of the TPS causes each developed TPS to be an item of expense, rather than an opportunity to leverage a previous TPS development activity that would render each TPS an investment. This paper discussses a high-level view of some of the key reasons these dependency constraints exist and describes the efforts underway to leverage new programming techniques to turn the “typical” TPS development circumstance from an expense to an investment and, ultimately, drive down the cost of avionics testing