DEVELOPMENT OF FUZZY SOFTWARE OPERATIONAL PROFILE

Abstract

Software operational profile (SOP) has found its extensive use in applications such as estimation of software reliability, allocation of testing resources, evaluation of software quality attributes, performance analysis and testing of software. However, benefits of the SOP can only be reaped if it is developed during early stages of software life cycle and updated for changes in operational structure with the progress in development of software process. In the early stages of software life cycle usage data is available only in linguistic form. This linguistic data may be obtained from previous release of software usage data, marketing surveys, experts or user's opinion or from combinations of these. Moreover, due to limited data resources and large efforts required to convert the gathered data into point estimates, reluctance is observed towards the development of SOP in spite of its numerous benefits. This paper proposes a fuzzy software operational profile (FSOP) approach, which takes input data in the form of linguistic variables from experts and assigns occurrence possibilities to the input parameters. Linguistic data collected from the experts are processed to obtain the resultant fuzzy operational profile. Further, the resultant profile is defuzzified and normalized to estimate occurrence probability of operations. The proposed method has been applied to various software systems and results obtained are compared with existing practice. Besides simplicity, FSOP can easily be altered for changes in operational architecture and frequencies simply by changing the location and value of the affected linguistic variable.