Talk:Reliability engineering

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[edit] See also section

In the see also section of this article, I have just added a link to product qualification even though such a page does not exist today. This is such a common term in both reliability engineering and quality engineering, that it would be very useful if someone could start to write it up. A Google search for "product qualification" just found 65,000 hits, so there's plenty to work from. DFH 19:59:33, 2005-09-01 (UTC)

[edit] Looks good for the customer if there are no failures

"Anyhow it looks good for the customer if there are no failures." This is a legitimate point, but it needs to be differently expressed. I can't come up with an alternative that doesn't use weasel words, so I've left it alone. Tom Harrison Talk 17:34, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

  • Something like this could be used: "No failures seems more reliable to ??? without detailed knowledge of ###".  ??? could be customers, people or others. ### could be statistics or mathematics. --Nordby73 11:11, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bayes Theorem

Bayes theorem is a very important tool in reliability engineering to reduce a complicated system into a simpler system or a black box. It should be mentioned in the article. -- HN.

[edit] Software reliability

Most software errors are "chaotic", in that the malfunctioning doesn't worsen with gradual changes to the input values or conditions of use, but instead, is either absent or completely fatal, and the latter only with very specific input values or conditions of use. Furthermore, the sequential way in which software is usually combined makes errors highly dependent: one failure or hangup somewhere may make the whole system fail or hang. So statistical reliability analysis doesn't seem to make much sense when applied to software errors in general. It does make sense when applied to performance or scalability issues, which are more likely to be relatively independent and more likely to have "gradual" behavior. ~~

(I am a layman on this subject, but I am a software developer, and I feel a paragraph of this kind should be included in the article. What do you think?) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Rp (talk • contribs) 19:02, 28 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Single Point of Failure

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (December 2007)

The term is part of the SPF disambiguation. When it's clicked on, we are redirected here. However, there is no mention of this term in the article. I know it to be a part of a system that, when it fails, also makes a substantial (I know, that's vague) part of the rest of the system fail. For example, a power supply in a home computer (a defect will render the entire computer unusable), or a network switch in a small network, where all computers/servers are hooked up to that single switch (which will render the whole network useless).

I am hardly a capable wikipedia editor, nor am I very familiar with reliability theory -- in fact, I came here to look up a clear explanation for non-IT people -- but wouldn't it makes sense to include at least a mention of this term in the article, or otherwise remove the redirect and make a tiny article/stub that includes a link to reliability theory for a broader explanation of the topic?

85.145.112.69 17:43, 19 September 2007 (UTC) Frederik