Software Reliability Growth As An Offshoot Of Verification And Validation Process

Software developed for mission-critical systems employ rigorous verification and validation techniques to achieve good quality. Traditional software reliability models use execution time during software testing for reliability estimation. Although testing duration is an important factor in reliability, it is possible to improve the accuracy of estimation by factoring other techniques that influence the final software quality. In this paper, we propose a novel method to utilize the effectiveness of the verification and validation process to predict reliability. The main idea is that failure detection is not only related to the time that the software experiences under testing, but also to different levels of review rigors the software has undergone. Our experimental results with multi-version software used in mission-critical systems show our model achieves substantial reliability estimate.