A change‐point perspective on the software failure process

In the software reliability growth phase, the nature of the failure data is, in a sense, determined by the software testing process. There are many factors that affect software testing. These factors are unlikely to all be kept stable during the entire process of software testing, with the result that the underlying statistics of the failure process is likely to experience major changes. In this case, it is appropriate to use the change‐point method in the reliability analysis. This paper considers a change‐point model and proposes a change‐point estimator for reliability analysis. Experimentally, the change‐point method is applied to a real dataset, which verifies the validity of the model. A Monte Carlo simulation study on the asymptotic properties of the estimator indicates that the model is consistent. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.