A Unified Modeling Framework Incorporating Change-Point for Measuring Reliability Growth daring Software Testing

Abstract

Reliability of software often depends considerably on the quality of software testing. By assessing reliability we can also judge the quality of testing. Alternately, reliability estimation can be used to decide whether enough testing has been done. Hence, besides characterizing an important quality property of the product being delivered, reliability estimation has a direct role in project management-the reliability models being used by the project manager to decide when to stop testing Jalote [12]. A plethora of software reliability growth models (SRGM) have been developed during the last three decades. Various software development environment and assumptions have been incorporated during the development of these models. From our studies, many existing SRGM can be unified under a more general formulation. In fact, model unification is an insightful investigation for the study of general models without making many assumptions. In the literature various software reliability models have been proposed incorporating change-point concept. To the best of our knowledge these models have been developed separately. In this paper we propose a general framework for deriving several software reliability growth models with change-point concept based on non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP). Some existing change-point models along with three new models have been derived from the proposed general framework. The models derived have been validated and verified using real data sets. Estimated Parameters and comparison criteria results have also been presented.