A method is provided for determining specifications that meet electronic system or integrated circuit product requirements at all stages of the product lifecycle. Early in the product lifecycle design features must be specified. Later in the lifecycle datasheet specifications must be determined and published to customers, and test specifications in manufacturing must be determined. The method includes acquiring data from a test vehicle, fitting the data to a copula-based statistical model using an appropriately programmed computer, and using the statistical model to compute producer- and customer-oriented figures of merit of a product, different from the test vehicle, using the appropriately programmed computer. Different size, fault tolerance schemes, test coverage, end-use (datasheet), and test condition specifications of the product may be modeled. The statistical model is a copula-based and so can take into account dependency among attributes of the product. The copula-based model has features, which enable significant computational efficiencies.