DQS's experience with SRE

Abstract

This is an experience report on the application of software reliability engineering (SRE) in developing the Data Quality System (DQS). DQS is a knowledge-based software system developed by Lucent Technologies. It was developed to synchronize data spread among several disparate databases. The first application of DQS was to telecommunications network databases. Because the development of DQS was a large custom software development project, SRE was employed to assist in measuring product quality and readiness for production use. In this report, we first describe what we wanted to accomplish in applying SRE methods in the DQS project. The AT&T best current practice outlined the prerequisites for applying SRE during testing. We describe how we addressed these prerequisites in the DQS project. In particular, we discuss specifics on: what assumptions were made regarding an operational profile; how test cases were selected to conform to operational profile usage; and how test log forms were designed and used to collect failure data and to manage the test effort itself. Next, we share the results of reliability growth modeling during the system testing and field trials. Finally, we highlight what we learned in our initial implementation of SRE and what plans were recommended for subsequent implementations.