AbstractWhen U.S. ROLAND production hardware was first assembled, the resulting reliability was far below the requirement. Rather than rationalizing the failures as ‘random’, each was pursued to correct the cause in design, manufacturing processes, or workmanship. A process and quality plan was implemented with improvements to such items as soldering techniques and circuit‐board fabrication. Many design improvements were also incorporated. The test programme was halted and replanned to benefit from an iterative test‐fix‐test process. The final result was an increase in the reliability to 3.6 times the cont