When everything possible has been done to produce articles with long lives, there remains the possibility that a further improvement in the articles may be obtained by running them, for some time, under realistic conditions. The fraction that does not fail may have a longer mean remaining life than the original articles. In this paper conditions on the life distribution of the original articles are found which will insure this. The Weibull, gamma, exponential, extreme value and log-normal life distributions are examined in detail. The most interesting case is the log-normal, for which it is always possible to increase the mean life to any extent desired by continuing to test until a sufficiently large number of articles have failed.