Unified Framework For Developing Testing Effort Dependent Software Reliability Growth Models With Change Point And Imperfect Debugging

In order to address the continuing demand for high quality Low cost reliable software, Hundreds of software reliability growth models (SRGMs) have been proposed in recent years. In spite of the diversity and elegance of many of these, no single model can be readily recommended as best to represent the challenging nature of the software testing. Of late, some authors have tried to develop a unifying approach so as to capture different growth curves, thus easing the model selection process. The work in this area done so far relates the fault removal process to the testing / execution time and does not consider the consumption pattern of resources such as computer time, manpower and number of executed test cases etc. More realistic modeling can result if the reliability growth process is studied with respect the amount of expended testing efforts. Due to the complexity of software system and incomplete understanding of software, the testing process may not be perfect or the fault detection /correction rate may change at any time moment. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for deriving several existing as well as new testing effort dependent software reliability growth models incorporating change point and the possibility of imperfect debugging and error generation. The proposed framework is based on standard probability distribution functions. The models developed have been validated and verified using real data sets. Estimated Parameters and comparison criteria results have also been presented