Towards quantitative software reliability assessment in incremental development processes

Abstract

The iterative and incremental development is becoming a major development process model in industry, and allows us for a good deal of parallelism between development and testing. In this paper we develop a quantitative software reliability assessment method in incremental development processes, based on the familiar non-homogeneous Poisson processes. More specifically, we utilize the software metrics observed in each incremental development and testing, and estimate the associated software reliability measures. In a numerical example with a real incremental developmental project data, it is shown that the estimate of software reliability with a specific model can take a realistic value, and that the reliability growth phenomenon can be observed even in the incremental development scheme.