Ensuring Software Reliability

Anyone who has worked on a medium to complex programming project, one that requires more than a few days to complete, knows how difficult and time-consuming it is to test software and find errors. It often requires several times more effort to locate and fix bugs than to design and write the program. At first we blame ourselves, thinking it is our own inadequacies that cause us to make so many mistakes. We soon learn that almost everyone has the same experiences. These realizations have led to studies of the process of developing software, undertaken to find out if there are ways to contain the errors or facilitate their locations and corrections. The current status of this field of study is reviewed in this book, which is Volume 38 of Dekker's extensive series on “Quality and Reliability” edited by E. G. Schilling.