Study of a New Software Reliability Growth Model under Uncertain Operating Environments and Dependent Failures

Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has prompted various industries to embark on digital transformation efforts, with software playing a critical role. Ensuring the reliability of software is of the utmost importance given its widespread use across multiple industries. For example, software has extensive applications in areas such as transportation, aviation, and military systems, where reliability problems can result in personal injuries and significant financial losses. Numerous studies have focused on software reliability. In particular, the software reliability growth model has served as a prominent tool for measuring software reliability. Previous studies have often assumed that the testing environment is representative of the operating environment and that software failures occur independently. However, the testing and operating environments can differ, and software failures can sometimes occur dependently. In this study, we propose a new model that assumes uncertain operating environments and dependent failures. In other words, the model proposed in this study takes into account a wider range of environments. The numerical examples in this study demonstrate that the goodness of fit of the new model is significantly better than that of the existing SRGM. Additionally, we show the utilization of the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) based on the new model to assess the reliability of the dataset.

A Software Reliability Model Considering a Scale Parameter of the Uncertainty and a New Criterion

“…Because software is used in many different ways, its roles have become very diverse, and the environment provided to each piece of software has also become very diverse. Many studies have been conducted on SRMs that assume uncertainty in operating environments [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Here, uncertain operating environments refer to the environments used by actual consumers.…”

“…Chang et al [25] proposed an SRM that considers testing coverage, which indicates whether sufficient tests have been performed in uncertain operating environments. Lee et al [26] proposed an uncertain operating environment SRM that assumes dependent failures to reflect a complex software structure.…”

“…In Equation ( 4), because b(t) is b(t) = β 2 t βt+1 , through substitution and summary, the NHPP SRM assumes uncertain operating environments expressed in the final form of Equation (5). Traditional NHPP SRMs for uncertain operating environments have proposed models with multiple assumptions, often consisting of four or more parameters [18][19][20]25,26]. However, these models make a number of assumptions that may be appropriate for particular situations.…”