Hardware testing is much more straightforward, because it is much more
difficult to design and build complex hardware, and because hardware
does not have many catastrophic failure modes. Additionally, hardware
is expensive and cannot easily be modified, so there is a much greater
incentive to get it right.


Oh really? How many circuit boards have you designed? I have designed
quite a few, and have done the embedded firmware for them as well.
Hardware designs can have bugs just as can software, they are just of a
different nature. Hardware bugs can be much harder to find and fix
than software becasue they are often the results of multiple variables
(circuit/environment/input conditions/power quality etc.). By
comparison, software is at least constrained to a specific set of
instructions and syntax. Plenty of hardware designs have bugs that
slip past initial testing and don't get found until the right corner
condition is hit...

Dean