Track 2 Session 1
8:50 to 10:00 a.m. Wednesday April 11, 2007

Unreliability: The Gap Between Bottom-up and Top-down

Companies may be confronted year after year with too many costs of non-quality, especially during warranty. Despite all reliability improvement programs and top-down priority, there is no sustainable improvement and it looks more like fire fighting than fire prevention. If the reliability problems still exist for a long period without a sustainable reliability improvement then the hardware and software are probably not the primary causes. They may be just the consequences of something else, which is called unreliability! The primary causes for unreliability might be a possible reliability knowledge gap somewhere between top-down management and bottom-up designers. Unfortunately, the top-down management is not aware of that gap and no actions are planned to build the required bridge. Therefore all reliability improvement actions are doomed to fail because they happen at the cutting edge while being blind. Reliability is built in by the bottom-up designers but the top-down management decides the unreliability level. It sounds too simple to be true but Unreliability is not just the opposite of reliability. It is far more. This session explains this gap and why R_(t)=1-F_(t) is not true if such a gap exists.