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While the NoMTBF movement is progressing, we still find those who want to use MTBF (or MTTF). As you know, MTxx-type metrics are means. They contain little information and are generally misunderstood and misused. So, what should a well-educated practitioner do?
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“What’s the MTBF of a Human?” That’s a bit of a strange question? I ask this question in my Reliability 101 course. Why ask such a weird question? I’ll tell you why. Because MTBF is the worst, most confusing, crappy metric used in the reliability discipline. Ok maybe that is a smidge harsh, it does have good intentions. But the amount of damage that has been done by the misunderstanding it has caused is horrendous. MTBF stands for “Mean Time Between Failure.” It is the inverse of failure rate. An MTBF of 100,000 hrs/failure is a failure rate of 1/100,000 fails/hr = .00001 fails/hr. Those are numbers, what does that look like in operation? [Read more…]
Fred discussing just how bad MTBF and related measures are for our profession.
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MTBF stands for ‘mean time between failure.’ This sounds intuitively easy to understand. But … if you haven’t taken the time to understand MTBF, and your organization relies on the reliability of its products, you are almost certainly in trouble.
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This week, I welcome Fred Schenkelberg back to the show to talk about mean time between failures and the basics of reliability math. Long story short, I hope you’re not using MTBF as a proxy for reliability!
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MTBF stands for ‘mean time between failure.’ This sounds intuitively easy to understand. But … if you haven’t taken the time to understand MTBF, and your organization relies on the reliability of its products, you are almost certainly in trouble. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what happens when you can’t avoid having the MTBF imposed upon you – even if it is your own organization and not the customer. Perhaps you are told that ‘our competitors quote the MTBF … so we have to as well!’ But you can (sneakily) tailor test data to get whatever MTBF you want. You can make life easy on yourself by not challenging this paradigm (noting that you will most likely get an unhappy customer). But it is almost impossible to apportion MTBF goals to individual designers that even allow the motivated ones to create a reliable system. So what do you do? Listen to this podcast to help you on your reliability journey.
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Carl and Fred discussing the pitfalls of using Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) as a metric for identifying reliability requirements.
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Chris and Fred discuss how management teams across many institutions continue to misuse the MTBF while believing they are fluent in the field of reliability (when they clearly aren’t)!
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Adam and Chris Stapelmann discussing metrics for reliability software.
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A Series of Unfortunate MTBF AssumptionsThe calculation of MTBF results in a larger number if we make a series of MTBF assumptions. We just need more time in the operating hours and fewer failures in the count of failures.
While we really want to understand the reliability performance of field units, we often make a series of small assumptions that impact the accuracy of MTBF estimates.
Here are just a few of these MTBF assumptions that I’ve seen and in some cases nearly all of them with one team. Reliability data has useful information is we gather and treat it well. [Read more…]
Andre and Fred discussing why we do not like using MTBF.
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Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is one of the most well know reliability metrics. 
But to anyone who works with reliability, it seems like it was developed by some evil anti-reliability mastermind to undermine the possibility of connecting reliability to anything or anyone.
Mean Time Between Failure means what?
This is the process of understanding everyone goes through as they are introduced to MTBF, formally or informally. [Read more…]
You have carefully crafted a detailed reliability goal including function, environment, probability, and duration, plus apportioned it to critical supplied subsystems and components. Your vendor decides to use MTBF instead.
What can you do? What should you do?
You have carefully crafted a detailed reliability goal including function, environment, probability, and duration, plus apportioned it to critical supplied subsystems and components. Your vendor decides to use MTBF instead.
What can you do? What should you do?
