A Petri-net approach for early-stage system-level software reliability estimation

This paper addresses software reliability modeling issues at the early stage of a software development for large-scale software products. The hierarchical view of a software product provides the modeling framework at the system level. This paper shows how to take the hierarchical description and perform the system-level software reliability estimation using Petri net mechanisms. The Petri net modeling techniques are proposed for handling the dependency among software modules. Furthermore, this paper addresses issues of early-stage software reliability modeling when failure data is not available.