12 Tests That Reveal If Your Product Will FAIL
When your product works perfectly on your bench, it’s easy to assume it’ll keep working once people start using it.
But unless you actually test for reliability, you’re making a pretty risky assumption.
A working prototype doesn’t tell you how your product will hold up to vibration, moisture, drops, temperature changes, static shock, or long-term wear. That’s where reliability testing comes in.
In this video, I’ll show you twelve ways to test the reliability of your product, with practical advice for both professional and DIY testing, including simple methods you can use long before production.
Keep in mind, a lot of these tests are destructive. So don’t do them with a prototype you can’t afford to break.
Alright, let’s dive right in.
1. Drop Test
People drop things. They drop them on tile, on concrete, down stairs, and sometimes even while they’re powered on.
In a lab, drop testing is done with controlled drop towers.
The device is dropped from a specific height onto a hard surface, sometimes on all six faces and multiple corners, to simulate handling, shipping, and user accidents.
But you don’t need anything fancy to get started. Just drop your prototype from different heights and angles.
Try a three-foot drop onto concrete, then five feet. Then power it up and see what still works.
If your enclosure cracks, a button jams, or something rattles loose, you’ve already learned something important.
And it didn’t cost you anything but time.
2. Vibration Test
Even if your product spends its life sitting on a desk, it might still get bounced around during shipping. And vibration doesn’t just shake things loose.
It can cause wires to fray, solder joints to fail, and even crack PCBs over time.
Labs use shaker tables that simulate different vibration profiles. But you don’t need one.
You can strap your product to a handheld sander or a massager, or even mount it inside a car and drive around on rough roads. Let it run for an hour or two.
You might be surprised how many issues show up with sustained vibration.
Things like cracked connectors, loose wiring, or enclosure fatigue.
3. Thermal Cycling
If your product sits in a hot car all day, then gets used in an air-conditioned house, that’s a thermal cycle.
And it puts real stress on your materials. Labs use environmental chambers to alternate between cold and hot temperatures, sometimes ramping up or down really fast.
That reveals things like solder cracking or enclosure warping.
You can replicate this with a freezer and a kitchen oven. Move the device back and forth several times, letting it reach the target temp each time.
Just don’t go extreme enough to melt plastics or ruin batteries.
Thermal expansion mismatch between materials can slowly degrade performance or cause cracks.
Thermal cycling helps expose those problems before they become failures in the field.
4. High-Temperature Burn-In
Burn-in testing is like endurance training for your product. You power it on and leave it running for hours or even days at elevated temperatures to weed out early failures.
Labs usually do this at 70 to 85 degrees Celsius for 24 to 72 hours.
You can simulate that by running your product in a heated enclosure or an oven set just under 85 degrees.
And don’t just leave it idle. Exercise the system like a real user would. Display on, sensors running, Wi-Fi active, the whole thing.
This helps reveal thermal runaway, poor regulation, or overheating under load.
5. Cold Soak
Cold soak testing is easy to overlook, but it’s incredibly important, especially for battery-powered products or anything with a display.
Cold can wreck startup performance and make mechanical parts brittle.
In a lab, they’ll take it down to minus twenty or even minus forty Celsius.
At home, a freezer works great. Let your product sit for a few hours so everything, the enclosure, the battery, the PCB, all gets cold.
Then test if it boots up, how responsive it is, and whether anything feels sluggish or breaks. OLED displays might fade.
Li-ion batteries might sag under load or refuse to charge. If your product’s going to be used outdoors, this test is a must.
6. Humidity Test
Moisture causes damage over time. It creeps into enclosures, gets under chips, and corrodes exposed metal.
In the lab, they run humidity tests at 85 percent relative humidity at 60 to 85 degrees Celsius for a few days.
That kind of accelerated test simulates years of exposure.
You can build a DIY humidity chamber with a sealed plastic box, a wet sponge, and a gentle heat source like a heating pad or incandescent bulb.
Use a humidity sensor to make sure you’re hitting the right conditions.
Then power up your product and see if it still behaves normally after a couple days.
This can uncover long-term reliability issues that wouldn’t show up in normal usage.
7. Ingress Protection Against Dust and Water
Ingress just means stuff getting inside your product, like water, dirt, or dust.
If your product’s used outdoors, in a garage, or anywhere it might get dirty or wet, you’ll want to test for that.
The most common standards are IP ratings.
For example, IP67 means it’s fully dust-tight and can survive being submerged in water for a short time.
Labs test this with controlled water jets, submersion tanks, and dust chambers under pressure.
But you can test the basics yourself. Try spraying the product with a garden hose from different angles. Or submerge it in water, if it’s supposed to survive that.
For dust, you can use vacuumed dirt, flour, or sawdust. Just be prepared for something to fail. That’s the whole point.
8. Button and Connector Life Cycle Testing
These are two of the most common failure points, and they often fail way earlier than you’d expect.
Let’s start with buttons. Buttons get mashed over and over. If your user presses it twenty times a day, that’s over seven thousand presses a year.
Multiply that over three years, and you’d better make sure it’s rated for it.
You can test this manually, or automate it by attaching a rotating cam to a drill or small motor.
It doesn’t need to be fancy. Just something that presses the button repeatedly.
Connectors are trickier. They wear out from repeated insertions, poor alignment, or pressure on the cable.
These are harder to automate without a test jig, so your best bet is to manually plug and unplug them hundreds of times.
See if the fit loosens, if pins get bent, or if connection quality drops off.
If your product charges over USB or has any external connectors, this is essential.
9. Power Cycling
Many hardware bugs don’t show up while the product’s running. They show up when it powers on.
That’s when inrush current spikes, regulators wake up, microcontrollers boot, and peripherals initialize.
Labs will often do thousands of automated power cycles using relay banks or programmable outlets.
At home, you can use a smart plug with a timer. Or just toggle power manually. You’re looking for glitches, cold boot failures, or anything that gets worse over time.
Some issues only show up after the fiftieth or hundredth cycle. Those are exactly the ones you want to catch before you ship.
10. ESD Testing
Static shock doesn’t just zap users. It can kill your product instantly or cause weird intermittent issues that are nearly impossible to diagnose later.
Labs test this using specialized ESD guns that simulate a human touch at 2 to 15 kilovolts.
They discharge into specific contact points while the product is powered on and running.
At home, you can use a cheap ESD zapper or even just charge up a balloon or plastic ruler and touch the product repeatedly while it’s on.
Focus on exposed ports, buttons, metal trim, or anything a user might touch.
And don’t just test once. Zap it dozens of times under different conditions.
11. Environmental Combination Testing
Conditions rarely happen one at a time. You don’t just get cold, or just vibration, or just humidity.
You get combinations. Cold and wet. Vibration and heat. Drops and ESD. Sometimes all in the same day.
Labs can simulate these combinations in controlled chambers, but you can mix your own tests too.
Try vibrating your product while it’s powered on in a warm humid box.
Or drop it after it’s been frozen. Or cycle power right after a splash test.
The goal is to find the weaknesses that only show up when multiple stress factors combine, because that’s often how things actually fail.
12. HALT and HASS
HALT stands for Highly Accelerated Life Testing. HASS is Highly Accelerated Stress Screening. These are advanced reliability methods used to push products beyond their design limits.
In HALT, you deliberately stress the product with rapid thermal cycling, high vibration, overvoltage, and other extremes far beyond what the product would normally face.
The goal is to find failure modes early in development.
HASS is used later in manufacturing to screen for weak units based on the thresholds you discovered during HALT.
Now, you’re probably not going to build a HALT chamber in your garage. But you can apply the same mindset.
Push your product until it fails. Then fix what broke. Then push it again. That’s how you build something truly reliable.
