Software reliability? Software Reliability

The literature provides several alternative definitions of software reliability. Among them are the following.

"Reliability is the probability that the software will perform its intended functions satisfactorily over its next run, or over its next quantum of execution time" (Stevenson, 1995, p. 450).

"Software reliability is the probability that a given software system will function without failure in a given environmental condition during a specified period of time. A software failure here means the inability to perform an intended task specified by a requirement. In software reliability, one emphasis is the analysis of failure mechanisms. Most software reliability models are analytical models derived from assumptions of how failures occur" (Pham, 1995, p. 5).

"Software reliability is defined as the probability that a software fault that causes deviations from the required output by more than a specified tolerance, in a specified environment, does not occur during a specified exposure period. There are three distinct methods of estimating software reliability, namely, on the basis of its failure history, its behavior for a random sample of points taken from its input domain, or the number of seeded and actual faults detected by the test team. Seeded faults are those that are deliberately inserted into the program at the start of the debugging phase, the details of which are withheld from the testing team" (Ralston & Reilly, 199

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he wrong altitude could have fatal consequences. Programmers, on the other hand, have many opportunities to ponder, to test, to rethink. Given these opportunities, it seems reasonable to hope that the completed software will have a high degree of reliability. In fact, some people think that a programmer should indeed be able to absolutely positively guarantee that the software works as it is supposed to. However, reliability has not been the hallmark of computer software" (Capron, 1992, p 142). How do you measure software reliability? "Testing metrics must take two approaches to comprehensively evaluate the reliability. The first approach is the evaluation of the test plan, ensuring that the system contains the functionality specified in the requirements. This activity should reduce the number of errors due to lack of expected functionality. The second approach, one commonly associated with reliability, is the evaluation of the number of errors in the code and rate of finding/fixing them. The SATC has developed a model to simulate the finding of errors and projects the number of remaining errors and when they will all be identified" (Rosenberg, Hammer, & Shaw, 1998, p. 4). "An automated version of the Goel-Okumoto Non

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