Air Force Electronic Reliability Program

7.4.3 Some Early History of Systems Engineering – 1950's in IRE Publications (Part 1): The Problem

“…A further problem with reliability specifications was that reliability had long been a contract clause, but was often overlooked through the design phase, possibly because of the lack of a practical measure of reliability (Bielka, 1960;Crowley, 1958), to the embarrassment of the developer when a demonstration of reliability was demanded (Hill et al, 1956). A contributing reason to the relegation of reliability to a secondary role was the clarity of performance requirements compared with the vagueness of those for reliability (Lambert, 1958). Loewe (1960) and Smith (1956) argue that the judgment of how much to spend in design to improve reliability is dependant on having a figure of merit for the product system, or the equipment items of which it is comprised, and that meaningful figures can be developed if equipment is grouped into sets which affect achievement of particular performance objectives.…”