RESID: A Practical Stochastic Model for Software Reliability

TL;DR

RESID introduces a practical stochastic model for software reliability that accounts for imperfect debugging and software structure, offering an easy-to-implement approach for reliability estimation.

Contribution

It presents a novel reliability model focusing on the probability of bugginess, incorporating software structure and imperfect debugging, unlike previous bug count or inter-failure models.

Findings

RESID effectively models software reliability with imperfect debugging.

The approach simplifies implementation in real-world scenarios.

It improves reliability estimation accuracy over traditional methods.

Abstract

A new approach called RESID is proposed in this paper for estimating reliability of a software allowing for imperfect debugging. Unlike earlier approaches based on counting number of bugs or modelling inter-failure time gaps, RESID focuses on the probability of "bugginess" of different parts of a program buggy. This perspective allows an easy way to incorporate the structure of the software under test, as well as imperfect debugging. One main design objective behind RESID is ease of implementation in practical scenarios.