
110 SOF T WARE ENGINEERING AND TESTING
4.8 RELIABILITY METRICS
Reliability metrics are used to quantitatively express the reliability of a software product.
Some reliability metrics, which can be used to quantify the reliability of a
software product are:
1. MTTF (Mean Time to Failure). Components have an average lifetime
and this is reflected in the most widely used hardware reliability metric,
Mean Time to Failure (MTTF). The MTTF is the mean time for which a
component is expected to be operational.
The MTTF is the average time between observed system failures. An
MTTF of 500 means that one failure can be expected every 500 time units. ...