A Research Agenda for Software Reliability

It is well known that software development organizations spend a sizeable amount of their budget to rectify the defects introduced into their software systems during the development process. In addition to increasing the development cost, software faults also hurt organizations consuming software products in terms of lost business, and dissatisfied customers. In the case of safety-critical applications, software faults can have catastrophic results. With the ever-increasing dependence of our civil infrastructure to the correct functioning of software systems, the need for methods for engineering reliable software systems grows rapidly. My position is that research in the area of software reliability should pursue three complementary strategies:

[1]  Arbi Ghazarian,et al.  A Case Study of Source Code Evolution , 2009, 2009 13th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering.

[2]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  Value-Based Requirements Traceability: Lessons Learned , 2007, 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2007).

[3]  David Notkin,et al.  Software reflexion models: bridging the gap between source and high-level models , 1995, SIGSOFT FSE.

[4]  Carl K. Chang,et al.  Event-Based Traceability for Managing Evolutionary Change , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[5]  Arbi Ghazarian,et al.  A Case Study of Defect Introduction Mechanisms , 2009, CAiSE.

[6]  M. R. Strens,et al.  Strategies, tactics and methods for handling change , 1996, Proceedings IEEE Symposium and Workshop on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems.

[7]  M. R. Strens,et al.  Change analysis: a step towards meeting the challenge of changing requirements , 1996, Proceedings IEEE Symposium and Workshop on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems.

[8]  Ray Offen,et al.  A logical framework for modeling and reasoning about the evolution of requirements , 1997, Proceedings of ISRE '97: 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering.