Assessing Software Reliability Using Exponential Imperfect Debugging Model

Software reliability is one of the most important characteristics of software quality. As the usage of software reliability is growing rapidly, accessing the software reliability is a critical task in development of a software system. So, many Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGM) are used in order to decide upon the reliable or unreliable of the developed software very quickly. The well known software reliability growth model called as Exponential Imperfect Debugging model is a two parameter Non Homogeneous Poisson Process model which is widely used in software reliability growth modeling. In this paper, we propose to apply Statistical Process Control (SPC) to monitor software reliability process. A control mechanism is proposed based on the cumulative observations of failures which are grouped using mean value function of the Exponential Imperfect Debugging model. The Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach is used to estimate the unknown parameters of the model. The process is illustrated by applying to real software failure data