We had a customer review today on one of my favourite topics in the whole wide engineering world - validation. Even though mentally I was gritting my teeth whilst they were being figuratively pulled, line item for line item, I think I managed to keep my friendly face on for most of the discussions. In fact, at a personal level, at least, the customer and I got on fine - and that’s most of the battle won in any aspect of business.
The ability to chat around as well as “deep dive into” the test plan helped us to skirt the realm of the kafkaesque; boxes still need ticking, and the time bomb of deadlines remains, but we could represent, or “play” our roles amicably. We touched upon the (lack of) sense of most validation testing in the automotive world and how basically inane the whole thing is, in reality, whilst accepting the fates that specifications and their authors bestowed upon us.
He wanted to see some testing in action, which is fair - it’s his product, after all, and his specs we’re testing to, so we visited the labs to see how things were going. The technician happened to be performing a vacuum seal test at the time: pull the vacuum, wait for it to stabilise, close off the valve, let the test sample stabilise, start the clock, review the pressure increase over time - finish, record and repeat. As the test went on, part after part, I started joking that normally we close the curtains for this test so that the lab tech can start meditating during the dwell times.
The customer engineer reacted nicely to this, and suggested that it would be worth sending anybody who’s overly stressed to do this test for a little while - half an hour, say. In that way, we get this actually quite pointless test done whilst simultaneously relaxing our colleagues and protecting the lab technician from ultimate boredom.
Perhaps I’ll take him up on that idea - it’s not a bad one at all. Welcome to a new hashtag: #validationzen
