In the traditional design of reliability tests for assuring the mean time to failure (MTTF) in Weibull distribution with shape and scale parameters, it has been assumed that the shape parameter in the acceptable and rejectable populations is the same fixed number. For the purpose of expanding applicability of the reliability testing, Hisada and Arizono have developed a reliability sampling scheme for assuring MTTF in the Weibull distribution under the conditions that shape parameters in the both populations do not necessarily coincide, and are specified as interval values, respectively. Then, their reliability test is designed using the complete lifetime data. In general, the reliability testing based on the complete lifetime data requires the long testing time. As a consequence, the testing cost becomes sometimes expensive. In this paper, for the purpose of an economical plan of the reliability test, we consider the sudden death procedure for assuring MTTF in Weibull distribution with variational shape parameter. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.