A coverage based model for software reliability estimation
Pankaj Jalote, Y.R. Muralidhara · 2002
There is an increasing interest in estimating and predicting the reliability of software systems. Many models exist for reliability estimation. Most of these models consider a software system as a black box and predict the reliability based on the failure data observed during testing. The application of these models require a fair amount of data collection, computation, and expertise and computation for interpreting the results. We propose a model that is based on the coverage history of the program. A software is modeled as a graph, and the reliability of a node is assumed to be a function of the number of times it gets executed during testing-the larger the number of times a node gets executed, the higher its reliability. The reliability of the software system is then computed through simulation by using the reliabilities of the individual nodes. With such a model, coverage analysis tools can easily be extended to compute the reliability also, thereby fully automating reliability estimation.