For highly innovative products the actual product use is often very uncertain. However, the uncertainty/variability in product use and its impact on product reliability has rarely been explored. The mismatch between the anticipated product use and the actual product use can lead to considerable unexpected technical and non-technical reliability risks. However, traditional reliability management techniques focus primarily on managing technical reliability risks. This situation results in an increasing amount of no-fault-found or fault-not-found reports in the highly innovative consumer electronics (CE) industry. Under the time-to-market pressure, it is increasingly important to take into consideration the significant factors that determine product use in the early product development process. In the Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework, a top-down approach (operational profile) is used to analyse the product use. However, an operational profile cannot be directly applied to analyse product use for CE products due to the differences between the reliability of software products and that of CE products. This paper proposes an enhanced framework to structurally analyse unexpected user-product interactions for highly innovative CE products. In this framework, the product, user and environmental conditions are used to analyse user-product interactions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.