Initial results of using in-process testing metrics to estimate software reliability
Nachiappan Nagappan, Laurie A. Williams, Mladen Alan Vouk, Jason A. Osborne · NCSU Libraries Repository (North Carolina State University Libraries) · 2004
Demand for quality in software applications has grown, and awareness of software testing-related issues plays an important role in that.Unfortunately, in industrial practice, information on field reliability of a product tends to become available too late in the software development process to affordably guide corrective actions.An important step towards remediation of this problem lies in the ability to provide an early estimation of software reliability.This paper presents a suite of in-process metrics that leverages the software testing effort to provide (1) an assessment of potential software field reliability in early software development phases, (2) an intuitive, color-coded, feedback to the developers on the quality of their testing effort, and (3) the identification of software elements that may be fault-prone.A structured experiment conducted at North Carolina State University indicates that our approach is promising.Further studies, predominantly with industrial projects, are being conducted.