Failure Rate of Software

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to software reliability modelling and, specifically, to a discussion of some of the software failure rate models. It should not be considered a comprehensive study of the subject, but rather a brief illustration of the methods and approaches of the previous chapters. In Section 9.2, for instance, we consider several well-known ‘empirical’ models for software failure rates that can be described in terms of the corresponding stochastic intensity processes defined and studied in Chapters 4 and 5. In Section 9.3, a different approach is presented based on a stochastic model similar to the model used for constructing the failure rate for spatial survival in Section 8.3 (Finkelstein, 1999c). For a more detailed basic treatment of software reliability issues, the reader is referred to, e.g., the books of Musa et al. (1987), Xie (1991), Pham (2000) and Singpurwalla and Wilson (1999).