Mass production nowadays entails the need for accelerated testing of product’s quality, giving rise to automation of testing processes, and especially in production of software and hardware.
Automation of set-top-box testing can be a huge investment in terms of procurement of testing equipment. On the other hand, inefficient and time-consuming manual testing is even more expensive due to high probability of human error. This results in deployment of relatively unreliable devices with potentially high failure rate which will eventually be returned to the manufacturer, repairer or operator thus increasing the overall cost of product positioning (transport, services, etc).
One method for automated testing of a number of set-top boxes is called "round-robin".