How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?
My first tech job was testing software at Hewlett Packard, circa '96-97. One of the projects I worked on was HP's first (I think) digital camera. The hardware testing was apparently running behind due to challenges the hardware team was having with abrasive qualities of some of the paints they'd chosen, and one day a bunch of us were asked to go help expedite some hardware tests.<p>Every button, latch, and moveable part on that camera was rated to a certain number of presses and uses. A team of folks (which for one day that winter included myself) sat in a room pressing buttons and drawing notches on a sheet of paper until the product failed or qualified. It was kind of eye opening, actually. For weeks afterward I was nervous about whether the next button press on my tv remote was the last :)<p>I'm curious, 16 years later.. How much of this testing is remains so manual? At HP I think the number of products and rate of change in early development made building fixtures to do this sort of thing pretty costly compared to low wage human testers.