Increasing customer demands for increasing functionality, while at the same time maintaining consistently high quality and reliability of the developed product, present many companies with a major challenge. In order to meet customer requirements, a holistic understanding of the product is the be-all and end-all. This includes not only finding out what kind of stresses, such as temperature, dirt and moisture, the product can withstand as a maximum. It also involves understanding how the customer will use the product in actual operation.
Apart from that, testing has now established itself as an integral part of the product life cycle across all industries. Tests are defined, for example, to release the next stage in the product development process. Life cycle tests are just as much a part of this as functional tests.