CDF Archives

Poisson Distribution Calculation

Let’s say the results of software testing averaged three defects per 10,000 lines of code. The criteria for release is 90% probability of 5 or fewer defects per 10k lines.

If this product ready for release?

The Poisson distribution is appropriate here as it is useful for modeling defects per unit, count per area, or arrivals per hour. If the data, in this case, the defect count per lines of code to be modeled by the Poisson distribution, the probability of an occurrence (defect in this case) has to be proportional to the interval (lines of code in this case). Also, the number of occurrences (defects) per interval must be independent (more on statistical independence in another post). [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Reading CDF Plots

First the Question:

Fred,
Early in the FMEA lecture you worked through a homework problem and you mentioned that a cdf may not be linear (hence the reason for giving three points in a reliability goal). Can you give an example of two of things you’ve seen with non-linear cdf’s? I’ve only done limited reliability testing at this point, but everything I’ve done and every example I’ve ever seen have had linear cdf’s.
Thanks,
John

And, my response: [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 25 Comments

How to Calculate Warranty Failures

Let’s say we have a product that most often fails for one major component. Let’s say a fan (it could be anything, and while I don’t have anything against fans, it’s easy to picture).

Ok, this fan has a data sheet with the classic reliability claim of 50,000 hours MTBF. For those that know about my disdain for MTBF (www.nomtbf.com) rest assured I’m not going to get into it here. The basic approach for estimating the number of failure during any [Read more…]