Dismissing Failures

Abstract

Chris and Fred discuss a common problem of dismissing or ignoring failures, especially when they don’t fit your ‘profile.’

Key Points

Join Chris and Fred as they discuss the problems and hazards that arise when a failure occurs and is ignored. This can be tricky, as it can sometimes be hard to spot them.

Topics include:

Prototype failures dismissed as ‘it’s a prototype and a one-off.’ Then why even make prototypes? Most decisions are based on ‘confidence.’ And we can go to all sorts of different places to get it. The best way to gain confidence is to thoroughly understand how something fails and recognize that future designs can address the root cause. Another approach to gaining confidence is to comply with standards, which is not the best way, but it involves less thinking. And yet another is to have products pass tests. So, we either create tests that are easy to pass to generate ‘confidence,’ or simply dismiss any failures for whatever reason we can, to maintain the façade of confidence.
Field failures dismissed due to ‘no fault found.’ Intermittent failures are notoriously difficult to address. We simply need to determine what caused the failure so that we can take appropriate action. Or do we? If we cannot replicate the failure, then we can take steps to prevent it from occurring again in the future by placing sensors, adding additional code, and so on. Alternatively, you can conduct a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), which involves identifying the likely causes of failure for future investigation. The trouble with RCA … is you need to do some additional thinking!
… or ’caused by user.’ As a rule, customers or users don’t want to break the thing they bought. Yet many manufacturers and producers act as if their users and customers have nothing better to do than try to break products, and spend time without the product working, while they belligerently demand someone take them seriously. There is no doubt that one or two people like this exist, but there are probably more ‘bigfoots.’ If a customer or user says something failed, chances are it did.
Every failure holds information, if not dismissed. It is crazy how many organizations pay a lot of money to get reliability information by testing things to failure … and yet ignore other tests or field failures when it doesn’t suit them. Each failure has a story to tell, and chances are that if you address the failure in front of you, you resolve plenty of others before they ever occur as well.

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