Artificial Neural Network Applications for Software Reliability Prediction

Chapter 1Introduction

Computer systems controlled by software play a major role in day-to-day activities of the modern society. Applications of software has now reached diverse fields such as home appliances, hospital health care unit, industrial control, nuclear reactor plant, air traffic control, aircraft, shopping and many more. Many commercial and government organizations depend on software to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. The demand for application of software is increasing day-by-day. The failures in the software may lead to minor inconvenience and customer dissatisfaction, economic loss, loss of life and total system failure. Some of the tragic consequences of software failures are: i) Therac-25 accident: It is a computer controlled radiation therapy machine. Software failures led to death of six patients due to therapeutic overdose ii) Obama care health insurance portal: Due to software failures, this portal shallows one third insurance applications which leads to customer dissatisfaction iii) Social network: Due to automatic generation and recommendation of add friend request, private data of six million members of the network was made public iv) 22 people wrongly arrested in Australia due to failures in “NZ million courts computer system” v) Telephone outage: After changing three lines of code in a signaling program which contains millions lines of code, the local telephone systems in California stopped. Therefore, software professionals are constantly ...