Accelerated Testing for Software Reliability Assessment

It is necessary to assess the reliability of safety-critical systems to a high degree of confidence before they can be used in the field. One theoretically sound approach for assessing software reliability is to use statistical sampling according to the operational profile. However, this method requires a prohibitive amount of testing. To make this approach more feasible, it is necessary to reduce the time needed to execute a test case. In this paper, we develop transformation methods that speed up the execution of each test case so that a large number of test cases can be run in a shorter time. 1 Introduction Software reliability is becoming a dominant concern in software development, replacing traditional issues such as cost and schedule overruns. This particularly holds for the development of safety-critical process-control systems for aircrafts and space vehicles, emergency shutdown systems in nuclear power plants, military applications, etc. Any failure of these systems can resu..