Certified Reliability Engineer

The Science of Reliability: Questions Every Engineer Must Ask

Passing the ASQ CRE exam proves you know the definitions. True mastery requires questioning your systems, data, and assumptions with scientific rigor:

• Questioning the Failure Mode: Why did this part break? Was it stress, fatigue, corrosion, or design oversight? If we fix this specific component, did we solve the root cause or just shift the failure to the next weakest link?

• Questioning the Data: Is our sensor data clean, or are we modeling noise? Are we treating early wear-out data as a random failure rate? What missing parameters are skewing our Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)?

• Questioning the System: How does this subsystem interact under compound stress (temperature + vibration + age)? Have we engineered a system that fails gracefully, or one that cascades into catastrophic outage?

• Questioning the Test Plan: Are our accelerated life tests (ALT) forcing realistic failure mechanisms, or are we stressing the product so unnaturally that we're solving problems that will never exist in the field?

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

— Richard Feynman