Toward Practical Software Reliability Assessment with Change-Point Based on Hazard Rate Models

Abstract

A software hazard rate model is known as one of the important and useful mathematical models for describing a software failure-occurrence phenomenon and conducting quantitative software reliability assessment. It is known that there exists a case that characteristic of the software failure-occurrence or the fault-detection phenomenon is changed notably in a testing-phase or an operational phase due to changes of factors influencing on the software reliability growth process. Taking into consideration of the effect of the change in software reliability growth modeling is expected to conduct more accurate software reliability assessment because it is said that such approach enables us to conduct more plausible software reliability assessment reflecting an actual testing-environment. Especially in this paper, we develop exponential-type software hazard rate models with effect of change-point, and discuss change-point detection methods for applying our model to quantitative software reliability assessment. Finally, we conduct goodness-of-fit comparisons of our models with existing software hazard rate models, and show numerical examples for software reliability assessment based on our specific change-point models by using actual data.