Process-Oriented Software Reliability Modeling with Debugging Difficulties

摘要

We discuss software reliability growth modeling by considering the relationship between the debugging process, which mainly consists of the software failure observation, cause analysis and fault removal, and the software reliability growth process observed. Especially, we describe a software debugging process with the debugging difficulties by applying the notion of phase-type probability distribution. Further, we propose a few specific models for software reliability measurement by considering several debugging processes with the debugging difficulty respectively based on the notion of a phase-type probability distribution. We show that our models have better fitting performance compared with well-known the related existing model, which has been developed by focusing on the debugging process, by conducting goodness-of-fit comparisons using actual software counting data, and consider the usefulness of the debugging process-oriented software reliability growth modeling approach.