Software Reliability Modelling and Application in Software Development Life Cycle

With the accelerating demands of new features in embedded software viz diagnostic services, infotainment instigate complex software development. Ever-increasing software complexity gives rise to unreliable behaviours in the vehicle system. Software reliability model reinforces the confidence of the end-user about the compliant operation of the provided software with respect to requirements. This paper describes the application of software reliability engineering in the Software development life cycle. Further, we are demonstrating means to compute the software operational reliability by acquiring defects observed at the software testing phase. A detailed software reliability model selection process led us to conclude to a software reliability model based on the Nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) by Schneidewind. The discussed Software reliability model considers both fault detection and correction process for modelling and uses historical defect data of the software for the estimation of fault rate, here the reliability model considers a subset of defect data to incorporate the “data aging” in the estimation. Obtain the correct estimates of the software reliability model parameters we used the Statistical Modelling and Estimation of Reliability Functions for Software (SMERFS V3) software tool. The software reliability engineering aids the project planning team by estimating the target operation reliability of software as well as the necessary time to evaluate the software & defects to be resolved to achieve the target. Software Reliability helps the organization by maintaining the balance between defect escape rate and cost incurred on software testing. Subsequently, employing effective software reliability techniques facilitate the organization to put forward software quality, quantitatively to the customers.