The innovative testing concepts and techniques presented in this book are designed to enable engineers and managers to achieve a high level of success in product design and production. The book describes the testing process that can affect the quality of a product and presents an approach to using key test methods based on Department of Defense templates. The book focuses on the use of testing in support of design and manufacturing efforts rather than merely as a way of testing product quality. The professionals at AT&T provide detailed explanations of the techniques and applications of integrated testing, as well as practical information on failure reporting systems and design limits. They also include extensive coverage of the concept of "test, analyze, and fix", plus accounts of uniform test reports and field feedback.

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If you work within the framework of the FDA's General Principles of Software Validation or the FAA's DO-178B for safety-critical avionics the material is consistent with these governing documents, but is too outdated to be useful.

However, if you are working on integrated projects that are unregulated with respect to government controls you may find this book useful. It contains a wealth of useful guidelines for establishing and managing processes to support development of products that are based on embedded software or hardware/software integration, The core of this book is a collection of templates that were developed and proven in the DoD industry, and are designed to manage integrated testing, failure management and field feedback. Each element is applicable to commercial environments, especially for companies that are manufacturing intelligent network devices, data storage systems and specialty products such as digital control systems, sensors and other integrated hardware/software products.

The templates are introduced in Chapter 1, and each of the seven functional areas covered by the templates are discussed in separate chapters. These functional areas are: integrated testing, failure reporting, design limits, product life, test/analyze/fix process, uniform test reporting and field feedback. A chapter on applying these follows, but the material is slanted towards DoD issues. If you apply thought and imagination while reading this chapter you should get ideas on how to refactor the cases into your own environment.

Section 2 devotes three chapters to software design and test, which are based on the older waterfall development life cycle. However, this particular life cycle lends itself well to developing embedded systems, making this material valid and applicable to commercial environments.

Overall, this is a useful book for the intended audience I cited above if you can track down a copy. In particular, the checklists and overall framework are valuable, and much can be learned from the risk-based approach taken in the book.