On a general imperfect debugging software reliability growth model

Abstract Several software reliability growth models (SRGMs) based on non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) have been proposed in the literature which are suited only in a particular perfectly debugging environment. None of the existing models is flexible enough in the sense of being suitable under different testing environment. Moreover, there is hardly any SRGM which is developed to cater for an imperfect debugging environment. Therefore, it is important to develop models which are not only flexible but are also suited under imperfect debugging environment. In this paper, we propose an SRGM with imperfect fault detection in which the software faults (errors) detected during testing have been categorized into three classes, namely, minor, major and critical, depending on the severity of the faults. The application of the proposed model has been shown by applying it to different actual data sets. It is further compared with the other imperfect SRGMs in terms of goodness of fit.