A Literature Review of the Integration of Test Activities into the Product Development Process

The purpose of this paper is to investigate product development test processes. A literature review examines research on test activities in product design, product development and systems engineering research fields. The publications reviewed have been categorized based on the stage in development and placed into a proposed test process framework. The proposed framework sets an agenda of functions and characteristics important for the integration of test processes into model-based systems engineering. The findings presented are of interest to researchers by structuring test activities from product development, systems engineering and prototyping research into a context for the design process. The findings also allow practitioners to identify research at the level of planning and development stage relevant to their test processes.