An imperfect debugging model with two types of hazard rates for software reliability measurement and assessment

We propose a software reliability model which assumes that there are two types of software failures. The first type is caused by the faults latent in the system before the testing; the second type is caused by the faults regenerated randomly during the testing phase. The former and latter software failure-occurrence phenomena are described by a geometrically decreasing and a constant hazard rate, respectively. Further, this model describes the imperfect debugging environment in which the fault-correction activity corresponding to each software failure is not always performed perfectly Defining a random variable representing the cumulative number of faults successfully corrected up to a specified time point, we use a Markov process to formulate this model. Several quantitative measures for software reliability assessment are derived from this model. Finally, numerical examples of software reliability analysis based on the actual testing data are presented. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.