Assessment engineering is a new way to design and implement scalable, sustainable and ideally lower-cost solutions to the complexities of designing and developing tests. It represents a merger of sorts between cognitive task modeling and engineering design principles--a merger that requires some new thinking about the nature of score scales, item difficulty, and content. This article summarizes some recent developments in developing AE task model maps, task models, and templates as alternative to more traditional test specifications, and discusses some of the necessary quality control mechanisms that can ensure the consistent production of high quality items and test forms over time. (Contains 7 figures and 1 footnote.)