The planning of environmental or reliability testing becomes a question of sample size at some point. It’s probably the most common question I hear as a reliability engineer: How many samples do we need?

Having recently bought some furniture at a big box store, I couldn’t help seeing these three dreaded words were boldly printed on the outside of the carton: “Some Assembly Required.”

There’s a well-known quote by Henry Ford that goes like this, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s fair to note that some don’t believe he actually said that, but let’s go with it.