Development of Techniques and Models for Improving Software Reliability

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to develop the techniques and models for improving software reliability. This will lead to efficient design and development of quality software systems which can be delivered on time, within budget to the customers. A number of models are available in literature to predict software reliability. A structured review may provide commonalities and differences between predictability of these models. We thoroughly reviewed and compared various software reliability prediction models and metrics for the assessment and prediction of software reliability quantitatively. The findings may be used by software practitioners in later stages of software development to give a measurement of quality assessment. newline newlineIn this thesis, a non-homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) based software reliability growth model newlinefor three-tier client server system has been designed and developed. The proposed model has been newlinevalidated using standard failure dataset of seven commercial projects of public domain using newlinedifferent parameters like mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and R-values. The newlineproposed model specifically address the issue of when to release the software for operational use to newlinethe customers based on desired reliability achieved and optimized development cost. In order to newlinegeneralize results, an empirical study of software reliability growth model for three-tier client server newlinesystem has been conducted to improve predictability of the proposed model. Based on experimental results, it is observed that the proposed model is accurate in its prediction capacity having better newlinecapability of generalization. newlineThe findings of this work suggest that the proposed model and machine learning techniques can be used as effective tools for predicting software reliability accurately. newlineThe significance of this work can be used as guidelines for practitioners and industry professionals newlinein order to minimize the failure rate attaining maximum reliability, and cheaper software in a realistic operating context.