Modeling multi up-gradations of software with fault severity and measuring reliability for each release

Abstract

As most of the high-technology firms are trying to be more demand driven, technological advancements and up-gradations have become important force in software markets today. An up-graded software product comes in generations where the new version offers a significant improvement in performance or benefits over the previous generation. Features added to the software at frequent time intervals lead to complexity in the software system and add to the number of faults in the software, therefore, the developer of the software needs to keep a check on these faults along with the faults that have been left from the previous release. The proposed model categorizes the faults present in the software on the basis of their severity; simple and hard, with respect to the time they take for their removal. Simple faults are removed as soon as they are detected while hard faults require more effort and time to be removed. In this paper we have developed a multi-up-gradation software reliability model which is based on faults severity and the model is validated on real data sets with software which has been released in the market with new features four times. Furthermore, a trend line for the reliability of software has also been plotted for each release to show the behavior of reliability.