We use the concepts of degradation analysis as they relate to product reliability. Many failure mechanisms can be traced to an underlying degradation process. Degradation eventually leads to a weakness that can cause failure. There are several methodologies for the analysis of degradation data in reliability. This paper compares the explicit degradation methodology with the approximate degradation analysis. Specifically we perform a simulation study for linear degradation paths to explore the different estimations of the cumulative distribution function F(t) given by each methodology and we find that the two methods are competitive. We illustrate the results with data from a laser life test taken from Meeker & Escobar (1998).