Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is an internationally recognized expert on statistical distribution theory, and a book-powerhouse with over 24 authored books, four authored handbooks, and 30 edited books under his name. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Statistics published by Taylor & Francis. He was also the Editor-in-Chief for the revised version of Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences published by John Wiley & Sons. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece. In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Markos Koutras, Professor of Statistics and Applied Probability, is in the Department of Statistics and Insurance Science, University of Piraeus, and is currently the Vice-Rector of Finance, Planning and Development of the University of Piraeus, Greece. Koutras’ research interests include asymptotic theory, combinatorial distributions, multivariate analysis, reliability theory, statistical quality control, and theory of runs/scans/patterns, and he has published a book on the last topic, collaboratively with Professor N. Balakrishnan, with John Wiley & Sons. Fotios Milienos, Assistant Professor, in the Department of Sociology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece. His research interests include theory of runs and patterns, cure rate modeling, and statistical methods in behavioral research.

• 1. Introduction2. Preliminaries3. Binary start-up demonstration tests4. Multistate start-up demonstration tests5. An unified approach6. Statistical inference and a mixture model7. Some extended testing procedures and optimal design of tests8. Illustrative data analyses9. Applications to other fields