Reliability Models for Application Software in Maintenance Phase
Yung‐Chung Chen, Shih‐Ying Tsai, Peter Chen · Industrial Engineering & Management Systems · 2008
With growing demand for zero defects, predicting reliability of software systems is gaining importance. Software reliability models are used to estimate the reliability or the number of latent defects in a software product. Most reliability models to estimate the reliability of software in the literature are based on the development lifecycle stages. However, in the maintenance phase, the software needs to be corrected for errors and to be enhanced for the requests from users. These decrease the reliability of software. Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) have been applied successfully to model software reliability in development phase. The software reliability in maintenance phase exhibits many types of systematic or irregular behaviors. These may include cyclic behavior as well as long-term evolutionary trends. The cyclic behavior may involve multiple periodicities and may be asymmetric in nature. In this paper, SGRM has been adapted to develop a reliability prediction model for the software in maintenance phase. The model is established using maintenance data from a commercial shop floor control system. The model is accepted to be used for resource planning and assuring the quality of the maintenance work to the user.