Abstract
Introduced initially by Don Clausing as a pragmatic approach to reliability improvement, the Failure Mode Avoidance (FMA) strategy has been adopted and developed by the automotive industry as a way to increase the effectiveness of the product development process. This paper reviews the business case for Failure Mode Avoidance, presents key concepts behind the FMA approach, and focuses on the engineering framework and tools that support early detection of failure modes in design and the development of countermeasures.
Keywords: Reliability, Robustness, Systems Engineering, Requirements Specification, Design Verification, FMEA.