Analyzing Reliability Data and Designing Acceptance Tests

Persons designing testing programs to specify reliability functions and failure rates need theoretical means of assigning confidence intervals to the quantities obtained. Also, persons designing acceptance tests for items with unknown reliability functions need simple, general methods of test design which do not rely on the myriad specialized tables for specific mathematical models available in the literature. The two problems are really opposite ways of looking at the same theoretical structure. The theoretical structure is examined here and solutions to the problems are posed.