In an ideal world the design of a product or system will make use of perfect knowledge of all the risks and failure mechanisms. The designed product then is built perfectly without any errors or unexpected variation and will simply function as expected for the customer. Wouldn’t that be nice!
Along with perfect manufacturing and perfect materials, the assumption that we have perfect knowledge is the kicker though.
HOW TO ESTIMATE RELIABILTY EARLY IN A PROGRAM
In a few discussions about the perils of the mean time between failures (MTBF), individuals have asked about estimating MTBF (reliability) early in a program. They quickly referred to various parts count prediction methods as the only viable means to estimate MTBF. Continue reading
When reading a report and there is a large complex formula, maybe a derivation, do you just skip over it? Does a phrase such as 95% confidence of 98% reliability over 2 years not help your understanding of the result? When you read about hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, point estimates, parameters, independent identically distributed variables, random samples, orthogonal arrays, do you just shiver a bit? Do you know of folks around you who not only do not understand these terms but do not want to understand them? Continue reading
Have you said yourself or have you heard someone say any of the following:
Does a Certification Make You a Professional Reliability Engineer?
The short answer to this question is “No, it doesn’t.”
A certification is just a piece of paper that conveys that you have mastered some body of knowledge. You most likely also committed to abide by a code of ethics. You may also have committed to continuing education to maintain the certification. Continue reading