Life testing and acceptance sampling plans (ASPs) are two important fields of quality and reliability engineering. Designing sampling plans while the critical quality characteristic is lifetime is commonly known as reliability acceptance sampling plans (RASPs). When it is discussed, RASPs, life testing methods, and ASPs should be jointly taken into consideration, and consequently, this field attracts the attention of researchers. In this paper, two main methods for conducting life testing are investigated: failure censoring and time censoring. It is assumed that the lifetime of products follows an exponential distribution, and the quality of such items should be assessed. For the aforementioned life testing methods, mathematical models are developed to minimize the expected total costs of the test while constraints of producer and consumer risks are taken into consideration. Comparative studies and analyses are conducted to show better the performance of these two approaches of life testing from the economic point of view.
