43.7. Software reliability
43.7.1. Comparison with Hardware Reliability
During the last two decades, computers and microprocessors have undergone steady development, with particular improvement in reliability. Consequently, an increasing proportion of failures arise not from hardware malfunction but from errors in computer programs. These, unfortunately, are more difficult to locate and remove than are hardware faults.
We can use the same definition of reliability as we use for hardware, namely, the probability that the program will operate for a specified duration in a specified environment without a failure. We can also take advantage of redundancy to improve performance and use the same methods of calculation to estimate the overall reliability ...
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