NFF Special Session – Potentials of Applying Methods, Tools, Processes and Knowledge from Testing in Product Development to the NFF Problem

While verification is an important and expensive task in the development of airborne systems, insights gained into the system under test are still very much treated in an isolated way. This means that the knowledge established in the testing of airborne systems in product development is currently not applied to e.g. repair or maintenance processes. This raises the question, whether the methods, tools and processes as well as the knowledge which is generated during testing are exploitable in the following life cycle phases, especially for service and maintenance processes? This paper presents a vision and investigates the potentials of how the methods, tools, processes and knowledge used during the verification phase in the beginning of life of an airborne system could be utilized in later lifecycle phases. A special emphasis is placed on how they can be applied to improve repair and maintenance activities in the context of NFF (No Failure or No Fault Found) cases (and vice versa). It can be expected that the methods, tools, processes and knowledge could be valuable for reducing ground times of aircraft, minimizing repair costs, reducing efforts for failure analysis considerably and improving aircraft safety.