A New Approach For Developing Testing Effort Dependent Software Reliability Growth Models

Several software reliability growth models have been presented in the literature in the last three decades. They have been developed for uniform and non-uniform operational profile. Some of them are flexible whereas others are not. Model selection becomes an uphill task. Of late, some authors have tried to develop a unifying approach so as to capture different growth curves, thus easing the model selection process. The work in this area done so far relates the fault removal process to the testing / execution time and does not consider the consumption pattern of resources such as computer time, manpower and number of executed test cases etc. More realistic Unifying techniques can result if the reliability growth process is studied with respect the amount of expended testing efforts. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for deriving several existing as well as new testing effort dependent software reliability growth models with the possibility of imperfect debugging and error generation. The proposed modeling technique is based on the assumption that fault removal/correction is immediate to failure observation and can be extended for the case when there is a clear differentiation between failure observation/detection and fault removal/correction processes. We have also provided a data analysis based on the actual software failure data sets for some of the models discussed and proposed in the paper.