ABSTRACT
Failures can, and do, occur in electronic systems. The goal of product quality assurance at every step in the manufacturing and operating chain is to ensure that failures do not produce a systematic or repeatable pattern. The ideal is to eliminate failures altogether. Short of that, the secondary goal is to end up with a random distribution of failure modes. This indicates that the design of the system is fundamentally optimized and that failures are caused by random events that cannot be predicted. In an imperfect world, this is often the best that end users can hope for. Reliability and maintainability must be built into products or systems at every step in the design, construction, and maintenance process. They cannot be treated as an afterthought.
