A Method for Selecting Software Reliability Growth Models Using Partial Data

Abstract

Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) are useful for determining the software release date or additional testing efforts by using software failure data. It is not appropriate for a SRGM to apply to all software. And besides a large number of SRGMs have already been proposed to estimate software reliability measures. Therefore selection of an optimal SRGM for use in a particular case has been an important issue. The existing methods for selecting a SRGM use the entire collected failure data. However, initial failure data may not affect the future failure occurrence and, in some cases, it results in the distorted result when evaluating the future failure. In this paper, we suggest a method for selecting a SRGM based on the evaluation goodness-of-fit using partial data. Our approach uses partial data except for inordinately unstable failure data in the entire failure data. We will find a portion of data used to select a SRGM through the comparison between the entire failure data and the partial failure data excluded the initial failure data with respect to the predictive ability of future failures. To justify our approach this paper shows that the predictive ability of future failures using partial data is more accurate than using the entire failure data with the real collected failure data.