Identifying factors influencing reliability of professional systems

Modern product development strategies call for a more proactive approach to fight intense global competition in terms of technological innovation, shorter time to market, quality and reliability and accommodative price. From a reliability engineering perspective, development managers would like to estimate as early as possible how reliably the product is going to behave in the field, so they can then focus on system reliability improvement. To steer such a reliability driven development process, one of the important aspects in predicting the reliability behavior of a new product, is to know the factors that may influence its field performance. In this paper, two methods are proposed for identifying reliability factors and their significance in influencing the reliability of the product.