Systems Engineering is the discipline that oversees this. They define what tests will be required to validate the thing will do what it is supposed to before a

Systems Engineering is the discipline that oversees this. They define what tests will be required to validate the thing will do what it is supposed to before any hardware is built. I don’t think there is a good analogy to typical software QA, which is usually a “make sure it doesn’t break anything that already works” type of discipline.