The customer is often wrong. The agile notion of constantly soliciting customer feedback and incorporating that input into a product is a brilliant way to produce prototypes. Prototypes, of course, are poorly-implemented skeletons that mirror a real product.
Their function is to quickly minimize risk, which arises from vague requirements, unknown science issues, or from other uncertainties. Prototypes are invaluable when needed but are not required for every product. Maybe not for most.
Engineering teams need to be sheltered from customers when developing the real product.
Click here to read the hole article at EE Times.

Non-destructive internal inspection of MEMS bonded wafer pairs via acoustic micro imaging is useful in finding, characterizing and eliminating anomalies and defects.
During product development, acoustic inspection is helpful is modifying processes to avoid defects. During production, acoustic inspection spots rejects and identifies process drift.

The ultrasonic transducer that scans the wafer pair pulses UHF ultrasound into the top surface and receives the return echoes. Pulse-echo occurs thousands of times per second as the transducer moves across the surface. Each scanned x-y coordinate yields one pixel in the acoustic image which, in the high resolution typically used for MEMS wafers, consists of millions of pixels.
Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

QA&TEST has just recently inaugurated a brand new QA&TEST Research & Analysis Centre, by carrying out a first research study about “Challenges and Opportunities of the Embedded Software Quality and Testing”.

The objective of this first study was to identify the principal areas of interest for the software industry in the field of testing and quality. This study was intended as a starting point, to analyse the state of the industry and the challenges and opportunities that will be faced in the future, as well as a means to trigger deeper research in this field, which will be carried out by the QA&TEST Research & Analysis Centre in the future.

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Many companies run their regression test cases manually, so when does it make sense to begin automating your regression test cases? It makes sense to automate your test cases when you can no longer run the regression test cases on each build created. For example, if you are doing daily or weekly builds of your code to quality assurance and you cannot quickly run your regression test cases with each build, it is time to consider automating them.
To automate test cases, you must purchase an automated testing tool. Once you have purchased an automated tool, you can use the tool to create your regression test cases.

If you want to read the whole article at Sticky Minds, click here.

System design with open-source software has many advantages. Most notably among them is that development organizations can build systems faster, more flexibly, and more economically by tapping into this vast, free resource .
In this economy, it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario where anyone would start a development project with the plan to write it entirely from scratch. Numerous examples of open-source components including databases, kernels, stacks, report generators, XML parsers, utilities, tools, and platforms are available. They’re free and can easily be combined with other code to bring a system to market faster and more cost effectively. Developers can easily find code just using Google or by searching specialized sites for open-source code.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

QA&TEST presents the Tool Lab, an area reserved to the attendees in order to try different tools. At the Tool Lab, the exhibitors will explain how their tools work, and the attendees will have the opportunity to know and test them. The technical staff of the different companies involved will give the visitors advice.
The Tool Lab will have three presentations: Telelogic, an IBM company, will give a presentation entitled “Functional Test Management and Planning with Telelogic DOORS”; José Luis Fernández, professor of the Industrial Engineering University of Madrid, will give a demonstration about PPOOA architecture under the title “PPOOA, a model based approach for the architecture and performance evaluation of real-time systems” and, finally, SQS, QA&TEST organizing company, will exhibit “SQS Test Framework”.

Juan Carlos Sánchez Mirabal, test manager of the company NTE SA / Werfen Group, has confirmed his attendance as speaker at QA&TEST 2008.
Sánchez Mirabal, linked for over ten years to the testing world, will give a presentation entitled “Control configuration: maintaining items synchronized”, belonging to Configuration Management Track.
In his presentation, Sánchez Mirabal, will explain the importance of the information associated to the software, and how it is essential to keep under control the source code and the TestWare.
If you want more information about Juan Carlos Sánchez Mirabal, please, click here.

José Luis Fernández, professor of the Industrial Engineering University of Madrid, will give a demonstration at QA&TEST about PPOOA architecture.

PPOOA, Processes Pipelines in Object Oriented Architectures is an architectural style for concurrent object oriented architectures. It can be used when individual paths of execution are required to be concurrent and several processes may be positioned along the path to control the action.
PPOOA is based on the paradigm of “production line” where different software processes are acting on the information in sequence and process or transforms the data, in the same way to a production line where different operators or machines process or assemble a product.