Hi! I’m interested to hear your thoughts on reliability testing, what it means to you? Can you describe how you would do reliability testing in your context?
The reason for me asking, is that where I work, we do a specific test called the “reliability test” which means that we run and use the building management system we’re developing for 21 days in a customer like setup and monitor any unexpected failures. It’s important that the system can run for a very long time without crashing, and to simulate the usage of multiple years in 21 days, we say that we “age” the system by logging on more frequently, doing stuff more often in it, than a normal user would do in a normal day.
We are debating if this approach is reliability testing, or more of a stress test. On one hand, stressing the system really hard for short period of time would make us find issues related to that. Fixing those would make the system more reliable under stress, but when what about the long term, not so stressful situation? This boils down to: Are we doing the right thing?
It would be very interesting to hear from others, what values you put in to the meaning of reliability, to gain some inspiration for upcoming discussions