A reverse failure analyzer determines a group of diagnostic test procedures related to a particular vehicle/patient component from a pool of diagnostic procedures, and then identifies the specific failure modes of each of the diagnostic test procedures. The reverse failure analyzer further associates the specific failure modes with the respective vehicle/patient component with each of the diagnostic test procedures, and the symptoms associated with each of the diagnostic test procedures to the correlated vehicles/patients components and failure modes. In addition, the reverse failure analyzer can cross-reference various vehicle/patient components that can be the root cause of a particular symptom or a vehicle/patient operation problem. Furthermore, the reverse failure analyzer can receive observed symptoms regarding a particular test subject vehicle/patient and correlate the observed symptoms to the vehicle/patient components that can cause the symptoms based on the results of reverse failure analyses.
