Few things in a test engineer?s workday are as satisfying as being handed by a physical failure analyst a picture of a defect known to cause failure on a product-level test. It boosts the engineer?s confidence that test is detecting real defects, increases the fabrication facility?s urgency to eliminate the source of the defect and gives, like little else can, the customer assurance that the quality enhancement process is in action. Such satisfying moments may be more and more rare, however, as challenges to the physical failure analysis process make it increasingly difficult to get such pictures and as failure modes themselves become less amenable to the same. Increasingly our industry is going to have to rely upon failure root cause information that cannot be conveyed via a physical-failure-analysis-produced picture. Instead, test-based information will increasingly need to be exploited and trusted.