Combining binomial test data via two‐stage solutions

A commonly occurring problem in reliability testing is how to combine pass/fail test data that is collected from disparate environments. We have worked with colleagues in aerospace engineering for a number of years where two types of test environments in use are ground tests and flight tests. Ground tests are less expensive and consequently more numerous. Flight tests are much less frequent, but directly reflect the actual usage environment. We discuss a relatively simple combining approach that realizes the benefit of a larger sample size by using ground test data, but at the same time accounts for the difference between the two environments. We compare our solution with what look like more sophisticated approaches to the problem in order to calibrate its limitations. Overall, we find that our proposed solution is robust to its inherent assumptions, which explains its usefulness in practice. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.