Proportional hazards modelling of software failure data

The proportional hazards model has had many diverse and successful applications in hardware reliability studies. This success, coupled with the, as yet limited, experience from applications in software studies, indicates that the proportional hazards model has major potential for the successful modelling of software failure data. The proportional hazards modelling technique makes few assumptions, has modelling flexibility, is particularly useful for analysing sparse non-homogeneous data sets and naturally incorporates features known to affect software reliability which are often omitted from the classical software reliability models. We illustrate the potential of proportional hazards modelling by applying the model to familiar data sets from the software reliability literature.