Operational Profiles for Software Reliability
Heiko Koziolek · 2005
Software needs to be tested extensively before it is considered dependable and trustworthy. To guide testing, software developers often use an operational profile, which is a quantitative representation of how a system will be used. By documenting user inputs and their occurrence probabilities in such a profile, it can be ensured that the most used functions of a system are tested the most. Test cases can be generated directly out of an operational profile. Operational profiles are also a necessary part of quality-of-service prediction methods for software architectures, because these models have to include user inputs into their calculations. This paper outlines how operational profiles can be modelled in principle. Dierent kinds of usage descriptions of software system have been developed and are summarized in this article.