To aid in predicting the fatigue life of a component, fatigue tests are carried out using coupons to measure the rate of crack growth by applying constant amplitude cyclic loading and averaging the measured growth of a crack over thousands of cycles. However, there are also a number of special cases that need to be considered where the rate of crack growth is significantly different compared to that obtained from constant amplitude testing. Such as: the reduced rate of growth that occurs for small loads near the "threshold" or after the application of an "overload"; and the increased rate of crack growth associated with "short cracks" or after the application of an "underload".