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Stress plus life," or "Strife" testing, is a quick and inexpensive way to improve the reliability of your electronic product that will predict design weaknesses early in the development cycle, allowing you to introduce a more-robust product. It is a form of accelerated reliability testing that will give you improved reliability, higher through-process yields and greater customer satisfaction.
Strife's four steps are testing, failure analysis, design or process correction and change retesting. It can highlight oversights in your mean time between failure (MTBF) calculations.
To employ Strife, you choose the parameters that might affect your product's life. Popular choices are temperature, power, humidity, vibration, corrosive atmosphere and the cycling of each of those. You design your test using some of those parameters. Then you can test individually or in combinations until 50 percent of your samples fail. For example, you choose six samples (a typical number, but one to 20 samples have been used), hold two of the parameters at the upper operating limit and crank the third...