Does imperfect debugging affect software reliability growth?

Abstract

A discussion is presented of the improvement of conventional software reliability growth models by elimination of the unreasonable assumption that errors or faults in a program can be perfectly removed when they are detected. The results show that exponential-type software reliability growth models that deal with error-counting data could be used even if the perfect debugging assumption were not held, in which case the interpretation of the model parameters should be changed. An analysis of real project data is presented.