Study on the accelerated software reliability demonstration testing for high reliability software based on strengthened operational profile

Abstract

It usually takes a long time or huge amount of test cases to do software reliability demonstration testing (SRDT) on a very high reliability software by conventional methods, which leads to the fact that the conventional SRDT methods cannot be put into use for accurately predicting failure rate of a very high reliability software. By means of importance sampling, for high reliability software systems, an accelerated SRDT method is put forward based on the strengthened operational profile (OP) which is constructed on Musa's operational profile. For discrete-type and continuous-type software, this paper describes the methods doing SRDT and estimating software reliability separately. An experiment is done to demonstrate the method and the results show that similar demonstration conclusion and reliability evaluation value were obtained with less test cases, i.e. the method meets the requirement of accelerating SRDT, which is valuable in demonstrating a very high reliability software in limited resources.