A General Framework for Modeling of Multiple-Version Software with Change-Point

Software has become an integral part of our daily routine. In the technology-driven world, reliable software are needed to maintain the pace in this modern era. Providing a reliable software in a short interval of time for fulfilling users’ requirements has become a tedious task for software developers. To resolve this issue of fast delivery of software, firms are now releasing software in multiple versions. In multi-upgradations of software, remaining bugs of the previous release are treated along with the bugs of the new release. During the software development process, firm changes the testing strategy resulting in a change in fault detection rate. The clock time at which the failure detection rate changes is known as change-point in software reliability literature. A large number of SRGMs are presented and evaluated considering various characteristics of software during the last 30 years of hiatus. Almost all SRGMs have been used extensively in the literature for reliability estimation, evaluation, and appraisal of the reliability growth of software. To the best of our knowledge, the concept of change-point has been widely discussed with respect to fault detection/removal process of single release software only. In the proposed work, we extend the idea of change-point from single release to multi-release by proposing a generalized modeling framework. Furthermore, we have used generalized modified Weibull distribution for the defect assessment. Numerical example consisting various criteria for goodness of fit, viz., MSE, Bias, Variance, and RMSPE, and coefficient of determination are included to clarify the degree of agreement of the presented model based on a real and experimental set of failure data for multiple releases.