On Equilibrium Distribution Properties in Software Reliability Modeling

Abstract

The non-homogeneous Poisson processes (NHPPs) have gained much popularity in actual software testing phases to assess the software reliability, the number of remaining faults in the software, the software release schedule, {\it{etc}}. In this paper, we propose a novel modeling approach for the NHPP-based software reliability models (SRMs) to describe the stochastic behavior of software fault-detection processes. The fundamental idea is to apply the equilibrium distribution to the fault-detection time distribution. We study the equilibrium distribution properties in software reliability modeling and compare the resulting NHPP-based SRMs with the existing ones.