An Overview of Practical Software Reliability Prediction

This paper provides an overview of software reliability prediction. A piecewise application of exponential reliability growth models has been proven to precisely capture an entire defect trend from internal test phases to customer site test and operation phases. The last curve can be used to predict key quality metrics such as residual defects at delivery and customer found defects, software reliability and availability. The key metrics are useful for making a decision whether the software release is ready for delivery. The proposed approach has been successfully implemented for key telecommunication products over several years. Actual defect and field outage data from several releases of two large-scale software development projects are used to illustrate and validate the proposed approach.