Time Censoring
main topics 

Testing all units to failure in a life test usually does not make sense, especially if you are only interested in the lower percentiles of the distribution. For any percentile of interest, the precision of your results depends on:

·    Test duration

·    Sample size

To minimize cost, you need to balance the test duration and sample size. For a given precision, Minitab displays a list of sample sizes for each censoring time you provide. As time increases, the sample size decreases. Choose the time and sample size combination that minimizes costs.

For an accelerated life test plan, you only need to provide one set of censor times. Each time in the set corresponds to the censor time at a stress level. The first time corresponds to the lowest stress level, the second time corresponds to the second stress level, and so on.