A Brief Review of Software Reliability Prediction Models

Abstract

Software plays an important role in every field of human activity today varying from medical diagnosis to remote controlling spacecraft. Hence it is important for the software to provide failure-free performance whenever needed. The Information technology industry has witnessed rapid growth in the recent past. The competition among the firms also increased. The software organization in the developing countries like India can no longer survive on cost advantage alone. The software companies need to deliver reliable and quality software on time. A lot of research has been carried out on software quality management and reliability estimation. The objective of this paper is to provide a brief review of the major research contribution in the field of software reliability and identify the future research areas in software reliability estimation and prediction Keywords: software reliability growth models, nonhomogeneous Poisson process models, s-shaped models, imperfect debugging I. INTRODUCTION Many organizations utilize information technology (IT) to improve productivity, enhance operational efficiency, responsiveness, etc [1] As a result, the IT industry has witnessed tremendous growth in the past few decades. As the number of information technology companies increased, the competition among them also increased. The software organization in the developing countries like India can no longer survive or grow based on cost advantage alone. But delivering reliable and quality software on time within budgeted cost is a challenge for many organizations [2], [3]. Many times the companies would compromise on software testing and release the software with residual defects. This would make the software unreliable. The software reliability is defined as the probability of failure-free operation of a software system for a specified time in a specified environment [4]. The failure of the software during operations can lead to customer dissatisfaction, loss of market share, etc. The failure of a software used in the medical device or that used in air traffic control system can have a disastrous effect on the individual as well as society. Hence it is imperative for the software firms to ensure their product is sufficiently reliable before releasing the software for usage. This paper is a brief review of the important developments happened in the field of software reliability and identifies the future research areas. The remaining part of this article is arranged as follows: the session II describes the literature review methodology, the literature review analysis is given in session III and the conclusion are discussed in session IV. II. LITERATURE REVIEW METHODOLOGY A lot of articles have been presented at conferences, published in journals and books have been written in the last few decades on software reliability estimation and prediction. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief review of the important researches carried on developing software reliability models. The process started with searching for relevant published articles. The scope of the review is limited to the published books and papers published in journals and important conference proceedings. The databases searched are IEEE explore, Science direct, Google scholar and research gate. Two hundred and nine papers are identified for review. After reading the abstract, ninety-seven papers are shortlisted for review. Another twenty-nine papers are later dropped as the content is not directly related to the focus area of the review. Finally, sixty-eight papers are included in the review. The details are given in fig 1.