An Accurate Model of Software Reliability

Abstract

Software reliability is one of the important attributions of dependable systems. However, for the time being, the assumptions that software reliability measurement makes do not deal with some important factors that influence the accuracy of the software reliability models such as the complexity of the software and the effectiveness of test suite, resulting in inaccuracy or even incorrectness in evaluating the software reliability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose some practical strategies in order to improve the accuracy of software reliability measurement. The idea of the strategies presented in this paper is to incorporate the important factors related to the precision of software reliability measurement into reliability models, which mainly include complexity of software and the test effectiveness, making the software reliability models more adequate and accurate to the real measurement. Experimental results based on five programs selected have shown the feasibility and usefulness of the new approach.