Integral to the design of an embedded product should be Manufacturing and Testing Costs and approaches.  By including this information up front, the product can be designed for test before commitments are made to specific hardware and software.  Furthermore, by considering these testing costs early, the entire field service life cycle costs may be dramatically reduced.

Consider an appliance which has self test features with an internet connection and smart grid power management.  There is nothing to permit your appliance to be updated in the same way that your computer is updated today.  You could simply be asked, "There is an upgrade to  your appliance would you like to upgrade?"  By considering all the manufacturing, testing and feature issues together, you can substantially improve field servicability and reduce end of line testing to more of a self test mode.

The cost of building these tests into the product are largely represented by extra flash costs; however, if automatic field service is part of the maintenance  for the device, then the cost will be negligible.  This is because remote field service will rely upon downloading new firmware and running these tests separately.  If this feature is included in the main product (running off the internet or just run by field service representatives), then the ability to self test and to upgrade will add no additional cost other than the relatively small cost of reconfigurging the tests. 

Manufacturing and testing costs are best minimized along with minimizing field service costs with Internet based software updating and automatic diagnostics and both remote and on-site service.