Estimation of software reliability and development cost using interval type-2 fuzzy AHP
Subhashis Chatterjee, Bhagyashree Chaudhuri, Chandan Bhar, Ankur Shukla · 2017
Much of the work done in regard to reliability estimation of software relates itself to the testing or development phase of the commodity while less attempt has been made to estimate the reliability in the early phase of software development i.e., in the requirement analysis or design phase. Different reliability allocation methods have been used for assigning component reliability goals, which further were used to determine the reliability of the software. The present paper deals in a software reliability allocation model which has been developed based on user's view in regard to various functions constituting the software. Estimating the achievable reliability of the system at the planning or design phase itself makes reliability a singular measure to evaluate system performance. In order to accomplish the aforementioned task, a hierarchical approach has been established for the system in which the user's view has been combined with programmer and manager's view point to allocate reliability of each component followed by reliability allocation of the entire system. Interval Type-2 fuzzy analytical hierarchical process has been used to compute the software's component reliability in each case and a comparison has been put forth with the reliability measures obtained via Type-1 fuzzy analytical hierarchical process. A numerical example has been presented to validate the model based on both the aforementioned processes. Furthermore, considering the idea of efficiency of performance of each component an optimization problem has been formulated which evaluates the optimal cost for developing the software as also determines the optimal reliability the software is capable of achieving.