Minimum Test Case for Discrete-type Software Reliability Testing by Stratified Sampling

The traditional approach for generating software reliability test cases according to operational profile (OP) can be regarded as a simple random sampling. The stratified sampling is a complex but more accurate sampling approach which can make the sampling results more accurate and less variance by dividing the population into several subsets and randomly sampling from each subset respectively. Firstly, this paper introduced the traditional method which can be used to determine the number of test cases in the discrete-type software reliability demonstration testing. Secondly, the necessary condition for the minimum test case based on the stratified sampling was studied. Then a new approach was proposed and its principle was analyzed for determining the minimum test case of the discrete-type software by using the stratified sampling. Finally, the future work was discussed.