Efficiently represent diverse system field usage in reliability testing

This paper addresses the problem how to represent diverse field usage of professional systems in an efficient way, so that field usage can be incorporated in reliability tests. With diverse we mean the variability in system use in the field. Operational Profiles are constructed from system field data to represent system field use. A clustering technique is introduced and applied in a strategic way to reduce the diversity in describing diverse system use in the field. In this way testing effort could be reduced by a factor 87 while maintaining 70 % similarity with the original system field data.