Test Engineering in the NI Ecosystem (Part 1)

Owen Search

This post is intended to be the first of a series of posts targeted at exploring some of the development challenges I have faced during my time as a test engineer primarily leveraging the NI toolchain to do my work.  I hope the series will serve as an informative and insightful look at the discipline of test engineering, it's challenges and how I have muddled through solving some of those challenges (or at least worked within their constraints).  My experience as a (fairly) recent grad and new to the discipline is that it can be hard to navigate due to it's relatively tribal nature in most organizations.  Combine that with the seemingly small number of formal educational programs in test engineering and you end up with a line of work that seems to mean many different things to many different people and organizations.  My own goal for these posts is to attempt to make some sense of it all.

I should mention that most of me experience has been spent on the software side of things, although I am no stranger to sticking my head inside a 19" rack to go looking for the source of a short.  Please provide feedback and insight (and corrections) in the comments! ​

Read More