DESIGN TIP: The Tortoise and the Hare

Your primo product has a problem — a bad problem. You know you have an all-hands-on-deck situation, but how do you reach a solution as quickly as possible?

Here’s one strategy that often works: take a couple of your most experienced engineers and let them guess and check. If you’re lucky (and you live right), their experience and insight will lead them to the problem quickly.

But here’s the other part of the strategy: take the rest of your team and charge them with methodically and systematically identifying all possible causes, ranking them from most likely to least likely, and then ruling them out one by one, until they identify the source of the problem.

No part of the code or hardware is considered working until they prove it’s working with measurement and analysis. The tortoise will deliver the answer eventually, but the hare may just save the day.

About the author
Paul Franklin is Project Manager, Semiconductor Test Systems for Keithley Instruments (Cleveland, Ohio), which is part of the Tektronix test and measurement portfolio.