Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Sometimes I see images that speak strongly to how reliability engineering affects us everyday. Think of how many items you own or use systems that you wouldn’t touch/interact with if you couldn’t be absolutely sure they would work as expected. I wouldn’t use my microwave if I thought there was a 1/1000 chance it would catch fire. The amount of faith I have in traffic lights working correctly is astounding. If they malfunction it could be fatal.
In 1942, the US Air Force needed to figure out how to get more bombers home. They were losing them at an atrocious rate. They made a study of where the returning bombers were being hit. It was a great data set. But they should have done better in interpreting that data. Abraham Wald, a mathematician, corrected their assumptions and created the “Survivorship Bias principle.” This principle has changed the way we look at data sets and trends. It is a concept that I apply to field failure data sets regularly—more than once. It has caught evidence of core issues that would have otherwise been missed. [Read more…]
The clock in my ’79 Porsche 911 works perfectly. I don’t remember the last time I set it. Maybe I made a small adjustment six months ago, a year ago, don’t know? A modern day quartz clock does this no problem, a mechanical spring clock might struggle in such a rough environment. So was it quartz or mechanical? the ’70s was when quartz came on the scene, so either was a possibility. First I wanted to find out if it was ever replaced or serviced. So what did I do? I contacted the previous two owners. One purchased it new in ’79 and the other owned it for a five year period before I bought it. Neither recalls it ever being serviced or having a problem.
I can’t believe it! They took it to the next level, They hired a sniper, and he was good, he got a kill shot with one round.
I’m in the hull of my boat doing what should be the easiest “Spring prep before launch” I have ever done. I got everything set up a week earlier to make this ritual of “man vs machine” as easy as possible. I even took care of the squirrel problem from the previous year. [Read more…]
Adam and Fred discussing the Intent and Delivery Anchor method
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When it comes to product development, most technology companies understand the importance of reliability. In particular, the engineering teams usually have everything they need to design a reliable product, including the right testing tools and analysis methods.
At times, though, there can be problems. A product doesn’t ship on time. Or if it ships on time, it fails in the field.
Adam and Fred discussing a new way to ensure all the product goals guide the program all the time
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Adam and Jordon Suls discussing how reliability engineers find the reliability engineering profession
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Adam and Kishor Trivedi discussing new ways to model software reliability.
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Adam and Tim Gaens discussing how reliability engineering can often be a team of one in an organization.
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Adam and Keith Clark discussing the powerful impact of creating a new role in the organization, The Reliability Czar.
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I have a customer that has developed an impressive wrist worn biometric sensor for athletes. The system is worn on the athletes wrist, like many other personal devices. But this product is for serious athletes that aren’t just looking for non-descript data like step count and heart rate. What are you even supposed to do with that information? [Read more…]
Adam and Joe Schwendler discussing how “corner case use” in testing can quickly identify robustness weaknesses and most importantly wear out.
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Adam and Jessica discussing how the culture of reliability and maintenance can have a dramatic effect in how production and field issues are resolved.
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“What’s the MTBF of a Human?” That’s a bit of a strange question? I ask this question in my Reliability 101 course. Why ask such a weird question? I’ll tell you why. Because MTBF is the worst, most confusing, crappy metric used in the reliability discipline. Ok maybe that is a smidge harsh, it does have good intentions. But the amount of damage that has been done by the misunderstanding it has caused is horrendous. MTBF stands for “Mean Time Between Failure.” It is the inverse of failure rate. An MTBF of 100,000 hrs/failure is a failure rate of 1/100,000 fails/hr = .00001 fails/hr. Those are numbers, what does that look like in operation? [Read more…]
