Designing Tests

You will need to test materials, individual circuits, components, sub-systems, and your whole system. In order to test these, you will need to design tests based on metrics and parameters to inform your decision making.

For example, perhaps you want to test the accuracy of

Each step of the testing process builds towards justifying your decisions.

Test Layout

Your test should be reproduceable, and the writeup of the test should contain all of the necessary information for a reader to understand how the test was setup and executed.

Subheadings of your test:

• Aim - what the test is setting out to prove/determine
• Expected outcomes - if you have data from a data sheet, or have completed calculations to determine output, you should provide that as a benchmark
• Materials - what you have used to in order to create the test environment
• Setup - how you arranged the components and materials in order to run the test
• Collected Data - raw data from the tests.

You should run the test at least three times to be able to get an average score.

Analysis

Your analysis should explain the collected data, compare it to your benchmark - here you could provide graphs or easily interpreted data.

Now What?

Use the analysed data as evidence to inform a design decision. This is where testing directly influences your system.

A useful structure is:

Describe → Explain → Justify

This happened → because of this → so I decided to do this