Evaluate Your Solution

Evaluation is the most suspenseful part of the engineering design process, because most of the time there is at least some failure and it is often difficult to anticipate where the failures will occur. This is where you test your prototype or your process and see how well it performs. Remember that failed tests here do not mean your engineering was bad and they don't mean you failed. Engineering is an exploratory process where ideas are applied in an attempt to reshape the world in some way, and that is almost always a complex effort. The reason why the EDP is a cycle is that engineering is not about achieving perfection, it is about achieving improvement. By running through the EDP several times, you can improve a solution to the point where it passes your requirements and it's ready to put into production.