Өнімділікті сынау инженерінің қызметі және өнімділікті арттыру жолдары

A test engineer is a professional who determines how to create a process that would best test a particular product in manufacturing and related disciplines, in order to assure that the product meets applicable specifications. Test engineers are also responsible for determining the best way a test can be performed in order to achieve adequate test coverage. Often test engineers also serve as a liaison between manufacturing, design engineering, sales engineering and marketing communities as well.

Products' yield plays a very important part during their lifespan. There are usually three stages for a product, engineering, initial production (IP) and full production (FP). In early stages, engineering, production yield fluctuates a lot. The manufacturing process is under debugging and optimising. Foundry engineers usually work with factories to drive the yield of the product. Most companies set specific yield targets for each process to hit the expected yields. Once the product yield is stable, usually 80%, the test engineer is responsible for advancing the product from engineering stages to initial production stages. During this period, the test engineer will monitor the production yield for a period of time, change the test program limits and even work with foundry engineer to further improve the yield. Once the production yield is above 90%, the test engineer can turn on full production for this product, and will continue to monitor and improve production yield. In addition, yields will show if another process needs to be introduced (e. g., because processes already used cannot capture certain test errors). Yields can also decide if an existing test process can be trimmed down (step wise or time wise) or even eliminated. E. g., if the ESS errors can be captured during the 3rd hour, test time can be cut down from a normal 24 hours down to maybe 4. Or if a process consistently yields 100% during a 15 month period, teams can get together and decide to eliminate that process at all.

A contract manufacturer (CM) also provides a test engineer for their customers. The function of these test engineers varies depending on the level of support they provide for their customers: providing "interactive and first level of defense" only support or providing partial or ground up solutions.

Providing "interactive and first level of defense" only support is the usual job of the CM TE. Here are some typical job functions for a CM test engineer:
Reviewing test solutions with their partnering test engineers from the customer side. Analyzing if the infrastructure meets the requirements (from floor/line setup, network access to workstations and/or servers, operator manpower, etc.). Getting familiar with the customer products' technology. Being able to manage, train and support operators who performs the actual testing. Being able to debug and isolate problems. Gathering information to feed back to their partners. Because of their close involvement with the test line, they monitor the products going through the line and inspect the failed boards to decide if it really failed or if the failure was just caused by some improper test setup. Some examples of these false failures are:
Forgot to connect the cable to talk to the UUT (or misplacing the cable or putting it loose). This will cause the test automation to time out for any response from the UUT. Forgot to connect the loopback cables when testing a UUT with any networking interface (Ethernet/optical/etc ports). This will cause the traffic test to fail. Skipped some test process. Some test process will configure the UUT to load some firmware or put it in some state (i. e. preparing it to run in burn in mode) so when the test automation starts, whatever known state it is expecting will not be satisfied and thus fail. Skipped to implement some deviations that would require hardware/software changes to the UUT. Forgot to power up the unit right away when the test automation started. This will result to the same problem as the first item of this list. Forgot to attach any other test fixture components.