Software Reliability Engineering

Software-reliability engineering (SRE) stems from the needs of software users. The day-to-day operation of our society is increasingly more dependent on software-based systems and tolerance to failures of such systems is decreasing. Software engineering is not only expected to help deliver a software product of required functionality on time and within cost, it is also expected to help satisfy certain quality criteria. The most prominent one is reliability. SRE is the "applied science of predicting, measuring, and managing the reliability of software-based systems to maximize customer satisfaction" [Mus90, Lyu96]. This tutorial first provides some general information about the nature of SRE and how it relates to software process, including factors such as cost and benefits. This is followed by an overview of the SRE terminology and modeling issues. Finally, SRE practice is addresses by discussing specifics of SRE activities re..