With today’s demands for safe and reliable consumer products, it’s a sure bet that words like efficiency, throughput, repeatability, and safety are often being tossed around in quality assurance departments. The QA department is a manufacturer’s last chance to ensure that their products will be robust and reliable when they reach consumers, and the importance of efficient, repeatable, and accurate testing cannot be overstated. Fortunately, all of these qualities can be greatly improved by automating some or all of the testing process.
One of the most important requirements for quality testing is to ensure that the test results are repeatable—that similar tests on similar specimens produce similar results. Repeatability is an indicator that the results can be trusted and that the test is being performed properly every time. Without repeatable results, retesting might be required, which can be very costly.