Extensions to an Approach to the Modeling of Software Testing with Some Performance Comparisons

This paper shows how a major (and questionable) assumption underlying a previously reported approach to the modeling of software testing can be relaxed in order to provide a more realistic model. Under the assumption of uniform execution the new model is found to perform only marginally better than the previous model, indicating that the uniform execution assumption is a poor one. A non uniform execution model, also developed in the paper, is then shown to give very good performance on application to three sets of software reliability data. The results obtained point the way to further developments which are likely to lead to models whose performance is superior to that of the nonuniform execution model presented here. The paper also devotes some attention to the problem of comparison of performance of different models and points out some difficulties in this area