A General Software Reliability Growth Model with Testing Effort Dependent Learning Process

Abstract

Large number of software reliability growth models (SRGMs) exists in the literature, still more are being proposed as no single SRGM can be deemed to be the best. Better models are those which can capture the variability in the software failure curves obtained during the testing phase. These models are called flexible models and in this paper an attempt has been made to propose a flexible model with more realistic assumptions. The model takes into account the testing effort and knowledge gained by the testing team during testing. The applicability of the proposed model is shown by validating it on software failure data sets obtained from different real software development projects. Comparisons with established models in terms of goodness of fit, the Akaike Information Criterion, mean squared errors have been presented.