Program Reliability Estimation Tool By

Testing is a very demanding procedure in software production, that takes a lot of e ort, time and resources during both development and maintenance. Moreover, statistical testing is a very costly procedure, especially if high reliability requirements are placed on the software as in safety-critical, or safety-related software cases. The main question is when to stop testing, or how many tests are needed? Singh et al. [49], using the method of the negative binomial, developed a procedure for quantifying the reliability ofamodule. According to their approach, the number of tests can be computed based on hypothesis testing. We implemented this method for a reliability estimation of a program. In this work, a prototype black-box automated testing tool, called Program Re-liability Estimation Tool (PRET) was developed as a statistical test generator and reliability estimation tool based on an operational pro le (a proposed testing model) and negative binomial sampling. The tool has a command line user interface. The inputs to the PRET are: an integer (0 or 1) to choose the usage (0: only generate test cases, 1: does the testing process), the test speci cation context le name, the data le name, the program under test name, and the oracle name. PRET computes the number of test cases, generates test cases, runs the generated test cases, evaluates the result of each test run by using an oracle, and estimates the reliability ofthe program based on test results. ii Acknowledgements Iwould like to express my sincere and deepest thanks to Professor David L. Parnas for his guidance, insight, enthusiasm, encouragement and constant support throughout the preparation of this work. Iamvery grateful to Dr. Roman Viveros and Dr. Ridha Khedri for their support, time and their helpful comments on this thesis. sions. Iwould like to thank Dr. Dennis Peters for many helpful and encouraging discus-I would like to thank Mr. Ross Steingrimsson for testing the tool and his useful suggestions. I would like tothank Mrs. Doris Burns for all her help. Iwould like toacknowledge the nancial support of the Natural Sciences and En