A manager's guide to TPS first article acceptance testing

This paper offers insight into the challenges of First Article Testing (FAT) for Test Program Sets. While FAT represents a successful culmination of extensive development effort, this success comes only with advanced planning and buyer/seller cooperation. This paper emphasizes FAT challenges and their resolution. The paper is written against a real-world contract backdrop, and the problems encountered were real and representative of the generic challenges. The lessons imparted can provide valuable guidance to buyer and seller in a Test Program Set contract sell-off. For the lessons learned to be useful, however, they must be applied prior to FAT, and must result in effective, preemptive, bi-partisan management action. FAT is typically the end result of millions of dollars of expenditure and equivalent technical and emotional investment. It offers only two outcomes: "win-win" or "lose-lose". This paper is intended to assist a win-win result.