Abstract: | A step‐stress accelerated life testing model is considered for progressive type‐I censored experiments when the tested items are not monitored continuously but inspected at prespecified time points, producing thus grouped data. The underlying lifetime distributions belong to a general scale family of distributions. The points of stress‐level change are simultaneously inspection points as well while there is the option of assigning additional inspection points in between the stress‐level change points. In a Bayesian framework, the posterior distributions of the parameters of the model are derived for characteristic choices of prior distributions, as conjugate‐like and normal priors; vague or noninformative. The developed approach is illustrated on a simulated example and on a real data set, both known from the literature. The results are compared to previous analyses; frequentist or Bayes. |