Dependability, a key factor to the quality of products

The concept of dependability of a product has been successfully applied in the military and associated industries and also in the special high technology industries. Today, a need has been recognized for introducing this concept into other industrial branches together with the application of the IEC 300 and ISO 9000 series of standards. Introduces a generalized definition of dependability, based on: a set of attributes of a product; processes of appearance and removal of failures; and direct correlation with the concept of the quality of a product. Furthermore, gives a description of the IEC 300 series of standards on dependability and its correlation with the ISO 9000 series. Underlines the need for implementation of the existing documents of both series of standards and some desirable improvements of these documents.