Software reliability modeling under an uncertain testing environment
Md. Asraful Haque, Nesar Ahmad
Abstract
The increased demand for high-quality software makes software reliability modeling an important research area. The number of failures that occur during the testing phase over a specified period of time is usually used to determine how reliable a software system is. There are numerous reliability models suggested, addressing the various aspects of testing and debugging processes. The issue with those models is that they assume testing operations are conducted under controlled circumstances. The software testing environment, however, is not always consistent or ideal and its efficacy can be influenced by many uncertain factors such as testing effort, testing coverage, testing skills, hardware and software configuration differences, time and budget constraints, and incomplete or inaccurate requirements. The proposed model incorporates a special parameter that represents the effectiveness of the testing environment. The model was validated on two distinct datasets and it was compared to six well known models using four different goodness-of-fit criteria. Both datasets revealed that the suggested model outperforms the other models in prediction accuracy.