Depending on the culture of the firm, these early stages could involve a Product Requirements Document (PRD) and Marketing Requirements Document (MRD)—some of the earliest work done during a new product introduction (NPI).
By working with or as part of the NPI group, a test engineer ensures that a product is designed for both testability and manufacturability.
Because of these shortcuts, the product's manufacturability and testability becomes complicated (inability to read and write information, creating deviation from the process, etc.)
With this in mind, test engineers always get involved in the following reviews as well: Products' yield plays a very important part during their lifespan.
Yields can also decide if an existing test process can be trimmed down (step-wise or time-wise) or even eliminated.
Some examples of these false failures are: There is a small number of companies who prefer to outsource their test engineering work to their corresponding CM.