Breaking QA out of its silo: a cross-functional approach from software code to the factory floor

Carrying software engineering practices, traceability and acceptance criteria, over to quality control on a physical production line, in order to align departments.

Software can absorb a certain amount of variation in the hardware around it, but not indefinitely, and above all not silently. Going through the defects reported on Markprint, I found that some of them were not coming from the code at all: they came from variations in the adhesive media, which the software handled as best it could until the point where it no longer could. Fixing the code would have meant treating the symptom.