Phase-type software reliability model: parameter estimation algorithms with grouped data

Abstract

This paper introduces a phase-type software reliability model (PH-SRM) and develops parameter estimation algorithms with grouped data. The PH-SRM is one of the most flexible models, which contains the existing non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) models, and can approximate any type of NHPP-based models with high accuracy. Hence PH-SRM is promising to reduce the effort to select the best models in software reliability assessment. However, PH-SRM may involve many parameters compared to typical NHPP models. Thus the efficient parameter estimation algorithm is required. This paper enhances the parameter estimation algorithms for PH-SRM, so that they can handle grouped data. The grouped data is commonly applied to collect the data such as the number of bugs per day in practice. Thus the presented algorithms are helpful for the reliability assessment in practical software development project. Concretely, we consider the EM (expectation–maximization) algorithm for PH-SRM with both fault-detection time and grouped data. Finally, we examine performance of PH-SRM from the viewpoints of fitting ability.