Embedded systems often require one-off development fixtures to help support the development process. Made ad-hoc by hand, these fixtures are often fragile and can take valuable engineering time away from other important tasks. Changes to the PCB manufacturing ecosystem means creating and handling these fixtures doesn't need to be as painful, costly or as time consuming as it has been in the past.
As devices move towards being always online, and software development moves away from a fixed release schedule to a more organic continuous development, it is often useful to move end-user releases for those devices to a similar track. Assuming you have good development infrastructure, and suitable testing, it may be worthwhile looking at combining that with continuous deployment to provide maximum speed to market.
Software testing is one of those amorphous terms that covers a massive range of possibilities. Are we talking about integration, unit, black box, white box, systems, acceptance, regression, load, performance? The list goes on. In our experience, this is almost always a worthwhile effort, with paybacks in testing generally exceeding those from other areas, assuming that a pragmatic approach to testing is taken.
