Software Reliability from the Customer View

We augment our defect-prevention activities with analyses of what our customers experience - software failures. NED provides a suite of hardware and software products for business-critical applications, including the operating system, database management system, communication protocols, transaction monitors, and application-development tools. We update this suite quarterly in a release version update. An RVU is an aggregation of all product changes plus the previous version of all unchanged products, which totals several million lines of code. We track the failure rates for each RVU so that we can measure the customer experience with that update. We have been analyzing software failure data for the past several years to provide feedback on the effectiveness of our defect-prevention activities.