A General Software Reliability Growth Model for a Distributed Environment

Age : 45 Joined : 08 Mar 2008 Posts : 1850

With growth in demand for zero defects, predicting reliability of software products is gaining importance. Software reliability models are used to estimate the reliability of a software product. Most of the reliability models available in the literature, to estimate the reliability of software, are based on the complete software development lifecycle. There are, however, large software systems which are maintained by the developer organization themselves or by a third party vendor. Such systems have been in production for a long period of time. The various details regarding the development life cycle stages are usually not known to the organizations that are responsible for the maintenance of these systems. In such a scenario, the reliability models available for the complete development life cycle cannot be applied. However, predicting the defects, in the maintenance being done for such systems, is of primary importance so as to provide confidence to the system owner and also for resource planning. This paper proposes a software reliability model that incorporates testing effort and compares Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) based models in a distributed development environment. The proposed (NHPP) model assumes that the software system consists of a finite number of reused and newly developed sub-systems. The reused sub-systems do not involve the effect of severity of the faults on the software reliability growth phenomenon because they stabilize over a period of time, i.e. the growth is uniform, whereas the newly developed sub-system does involve the fault removal phenomena for reused and newly developed sub-systems have been modelled separately and are summed to obtain the total fault removal phenomenon of the software system. The model has been validated on several software datasets and it is shown that the proposed model fares comparatively better than the existing ones.
Keywords: DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT; FAULT SEVERITY; NON-HOMOGENEOUS POISSON PROCESS (NHPP); SOFTWARE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING (SRE); SOFTWARE RELIABILITY GROWTH MODEL