An enhanced parenting process: Predicting reliability in product's design phase

The philosophy of build-in reliability (BIR) or design for reliability (DFR) emphasizes the value of reliability prediction at a product's very early design stage. Due to the lack of reliability data, the reliability prediction in this phase often utilizes auxiliary information such as the reliability information of similar products or components. In this article, we propose an enhanced parenting process, which consists of rigorous mathematical formulations and provides statistical inference on the failure rate of the new product. An example is given to demonstrate our proposed method.