I have spent 25 years taking telemetry and tracking systems from the lab to the field, and the failures that cost the most were never the ones we tested for.
A battery that was supposed to last ten years and would not make five, because the real wake-ups were longer than the math. A parked truck that kept adding kilometers, because a stationary GPS is never quite stationary. A Raspberry Pi that slowed down while Linux swore it was running at full speed.
None of them showed up in the first round of bench tests; they showed up once conditions got closer to the field.
What is yours? The failure that only appeared once the device was out there: in a cabinet, on a pole, in a truck, in the sun. What gave it away, and what do you test for now that you did not before?
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