Brutally competitive markets are driving companies to design, build and improve their products faster and at lower costs. Faced with this economic climate, companies are understandably intent on freeing up resources—capital, engineering time and even plant space—that can be reallocated to high-growth, high-margin endeavors.For companies in high-tech electronics, testing is a mission-critical part of the new product development cycle. In these companies, test-related functions—and the engineers who perform them—consume enormous amounts of resources and company time.

The term “test environment” refers to the people, tools, practices and roles required to execute test-related functions. However, the test environment remains largely overlooked as a potential source of dramatic improvements in profitability, speed and engineering productivity.

In many companies, people either don’t see or don’t put the appropriate attention on this business within a business.” Like any business without strong metrics and rigorous financial statements, test-environment businesses tend to produce poor results at the bottom line. The symptoms of poor performance are easy to see if you know where to look.

Recognizing the symptoms of poor performance
The following are among the most common signs that a test environment is producing suboptimal business results:

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