Artificial Neural Network Applications for Software Reliability Prediction

Chapter 2Software Reliability Modelling

2.1 Introduction

Software reliability has important applications to software systems employed in diverse fields such as safety critical systems, industrial, commercial and military systems (Xie 1991). Software reliability models assess software reliability and provide important information to project managers such as number of errors remaining in the software after certain testing time, time required to achieve a specified reliability objective and testing resources. A large number of software reliability models exist in literature. These models try to address various software reliability issues and provide ways to measure it in various forms. Models also focus on identifying critical software reliability issues and factors affecting them to determine solution of these issues to improve cost effectiveness and timely development software.

In this chapter, different types of software reliability models along with their classification scheme are discussed. Different techniques used for software reliability prediction are also briefly presented. Application of artificial neural network for prediction of various software reliability indicator are also presented.

A review of the recent literature in software reliability is presented. In Section 2.2, software reliability models along with their classification are discussed. Different techniques used for software reliability modeling are briefly presented in Section 2.3. Section 2.4, importance ...