Soft Reliability

Via Aylin Koca, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Soft Reliability Project, they are doing some excellent work in the area of quality improvement in new product development via more precise and calibrated understanding of user feedback.

" The goal of Soft Reliability project is to control soft reliability problems in technical and end-user terms as well as in terms of (information flows in-) business processes.

In fast, strongly innovative product development processes, one of the key-problems of using formal specifications as reference for reliability problems is the difference between the time that is required to develop a product and to learn the actual product performance in the field.

Applying new technology in new products and submitting them to, for this product, new customers will always involve a high degree of uncertainty; uncertainty about the performance of the new technology and uncertainty about the way customers will apply this new technology. In other words: in strongly innovative products there can be a natural gap between real customer requirements and product specifications. The shorter the (relative) time is between the definition of specifications and actual customer feedback (provided that this feedback is sufficiently detailed) the smaller this gap will be. Over the last decades the speed to bring new technology to the market has increased considerably. However, the time required to learn about the actual performance and perception of this new technology has not been reduced at equal pace ... "