Reliability Assessment of Elementary COTS Software Component

For predicting the reliability of a software application composed third party software components like COTS (Commercial-Off-The-shelf) one has to heavily rely on the reliability values available which may not be always correct. As, there can be several factors which can effect the reliability values for example, the vendors may be biased, it may not be possible to select test cases to execute all possible executable paths of the program (as the source code and other design specifications are not available). As, a result errors may still remain and can go undetected. The testing environment may not be the same as the operational environment, etc. Considering all these situations an innovative approach has been developed so that the integrators and the developers can make a relative comparison among the components to select suitable components to be integrated into the application.