Sample implementation of the Littlewood holistic model for assessing software quality, safety and reliability

Abstract

Software quality, safety and reliability metrics should be collected, integrated, and analyzed throughout the development lifecycle so that corrective and preventive action can be taken in a timely and cost effective manner. It is too late to wait until the testing phase to collect and assess software quality information, particularly for mission critical systems. It is inadequate and can be misleading to only use the results obtained from testing to make a software safety or reliability assessment. To remedy this situation a holistic model which captures, integrates and analyzes product, process, and people/resource (P/sup 3/R) metrics, as recommended by B. Littlewood (1993), is needed. This paper defines one such possible implementation.