Testing Planning Tool Development

The majority of products will undergo numerous changes over the course of their product lifecycles, many of which will occur while the products are already in production. Research has shown that these engineering changes can propagate throughout the product of system and affect the functionality of the other components. Previous research in this lab has developed a 7-step method to generate a validation, verification and testing (VV&T) plan to assist change engineers in mitigating the negative effects of engineering change propagation. The proposed method can be a time-consuming and exhaustive process to execute, depending on the scope of the engineering change and the complexity of the system/product in question. As such, a computational support tool was developed that will assist the change engineering in the implementation of the method. The support tool will also assist in the documentation of the engineering change process and will help to minimize the opportunities for human error that can occur. In order to validate the execution of the support tool, an industry case study was used from the original research for the development of the 7-step method. The computational support tool successfully aided the development of a VV&T plan for the execution of an engineering change in an industry case study. However, additional testing is necessary to validate the claims.