This timely resource offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the techniques and practice of systems reliability and failure prevention, without the use of advanced mathematics. Featuring numerous, in-depth real-world examples, the book distills the author's many years of practical experience in designing and testing critical systems. The book helps you set reliability requirements for a new product, monitor compliance with these requirements during development and later life cycle phases, account for software failures in an integrated reliability assessment, and allocate a fixed reliability improvement budget to guide decisions by cost considerations and trade-offs. then focuses on the organizational causes of failure, a critical topic that rarely receives attention. It thoroughly examines the techniques for reducing and preventing failures that affect system reliability - conservative design, the use of analytical tools and procedures, extensive testing and redundancy - and discusses their capabilities and limitations. Moreover, this comprehensive reference covers the formulation of functional and reliability requirements for critical systems, and concludes with examples from communication networks, aircraft and missile systems, the process industry and satellite missions.