Fitting and Prediction Uncertainty for a Software Reliability Model

Abstract

The cost of system operational testing is steadily increasing. It is desirable for the software manager to know if the software is sufficiently well developed or reliable to support such testing. Current software reliability models provide only point estimates of the mean time to next failure or expected number of errors to occur in additional testing time. The goal of this thesis is to take into account prediction uncertainties of a software reliability model. Bootstrapping is used to provide the software manager with confidence limits of the predicted expected number of faults to occur for additional testing time. The results can be particularly useful to a software manager who has to answer a subjective question: is the software reliable enough to support system operational testing? A range of predicted expected number of faults will be of more use to a software manager, who has to justify the answer to this question, than just a point estimate. Two software fault data sets are analyzed with this techniques emphasizing how a software manager should analyze the results.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1992
Accession Number
ADA252173

Entities

People

  • Thomas E. Dennison

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Central Processing Units
  • Classification
  • Computer Programs
  • Confidence Limits
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Sets
  • Debugging
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Operations Research
  • Probability
  • Reliability
  • Software Development
  • Software Testing
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Time Intervals
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Regression Analysis.