Experience Report: Practical Software Availability Prediction in Telecommunication Industry

摘要

A large number of software reliability growth models have been developed since early 1970s, but there is no single model which can be used in every situation. Predicting software availability based on test defect data can be challenging. This paper provides a methodology to approach it. The proposed approach has been successfully implemented for key telecommunication products over several years. A piecewise application of exponential models is used to precisely capture an entire defect trend from internal test phases to customer site test and operation phase. The need for multiple curves is explained in terms of software content changes and test resources allocation such as testers, lab time and test cases. We will then present how to predict software reliability and availability based on test defect data. Actual defect and field outage data from several releases of two large-scale software development projects are used to illustrate and validate the proposed approach.