Software Reliability Modeling with Randomness of Fault Correction Probability

摘要

The assumption of perfect debugging is a controversial issue in software reliability modeling. However, reasonable methods for estimating the fault correction probability (FCP), which represents the probability that a fault is corrected and removed from the software system perfectly when a debugging activity is performed, remain to be established. This paper discusses the imperfect debugging modeling for software reliability measurement considering the randomness of the FCP, i.e., the FCP is treated as a random-distributed variable. We use the nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) to describe the software failure-occurrence phenomenon. We rederive the mean value function representing the expected cumulative number of faults detected up to time t, and several software reliability assessment measures. Finally, we show several numerical analyses to investigate the impact of the randomness of the FCP on software reliability evaluation.