Riding on the Shoulders of Giants 

In 1993, IEEE recognized Ralph De Paul by posthumously awarding him the John Slattery award for his contribution to diagnostic engineering, referring to him as “The Father of Testability”.  Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, however, DSI continued to push industry to strive towards higher levels of commitment to Design for Testability. Industry experts remained in contact with DSI and, when the IEEE began to develop its own standard on testability and diagnosability, Eric Gould (DSI’s current subject matter expert) was recruited to aid in its development. As a member of the Diagnostic and Maintenance Control subcommittee of IEEE SCC20, Gould was heavily involved with the writing of this standard—not only drafting the metrics section of the document, but also participating in the ballot resolution process.

The resulting IEEE Std 1522 (2004) is a document that provides a formal basis for the analytical component of the Design for Testability process. Ultimately, this standard was not only the result of years of collaborative effort by many of the most resume-rich and well-known subject matter experts in the field, but the strict ballot resolution process required by the IEEE ensured that the standard withstood the “test of fire” as it was reviewed by members of the Design for Testability community at large. Because the metrics defined within this standard were intended to be applied within a wide variety of domains, care was taken not only that the metrics were computationally precise, but that the definitions were sufficiently general to ensure universal applicability. This awareness of the full spectrum of concern is one of the areas in which this document differs from many of the more provincial descriptions of the testability process that can be found by searching the Internet.