Reliability Measurement of an Object Oriented Design: A Systematic Review

Reliability is one of the highly significant quality indicators of object oriented software. Its proper measurement or evaluation, constantly facilitate and improve the software development process. On the other hand, reliability has always been a mysterious theory and its truthful measurement or evaluation is a complex exercise. Researchers and practitioners have always argued that reliability should be considered as a key feature in order to promise the quality software. A perfect measure of software quality fully depends on reliability measurement, and as an outcome estimating reliability is a complex problem attracting significant research consideration. This review paper presents the results of a systematic literature review conducted to gather facts on software reliability estimation of object oriented design. In this review paper, our contribution is to discover the available recognized comprehensive and an absolute model or frameworks for measuring the reliability of object oriented design at an early phase of development life cycle. Keywords— Software reliability, reliability measurement, Software metrics, Object Oriented Design, Software Quality. I. Int roduct ion In software development industry the steps towards corrective actions for victorious software development procedure comes too late resulting in uselessness, delayed delivery, in excess of budget and poor quality with reduced capabilities software. An early assessment towards software post-release quality can be a useful therapy to maximize the business result by shortening the time and increasing the probability of project success. The development group is also a beneficiary of the software quality estimation technique as they obtain an early recommendation regarding the quality of their product. Software quality estimation has been proved to be one of the most upcoming as well as interesting research topics of the decade which aims to recognize and minimize the error prone tasks to reduce the overall software development cost and time. For the motivation that measurement is the key to achieving high reliability software, it is significant for software engineers to be familiar in this area. The software engineer would apply the body of information to improve the reliability of software throughout the development life cycle. In addition, the body of knowledge may be used as course of action for practitioners, licensing of software professionals, and used for training in software reliability measurement. Whenever we refer to “measurement”, we will be referring to the measurement of the reliability of the software. Our motivation is that without measurement, software engineers would not be able to achieve high reliability software. Thus, design phase measurement is important to developing reliable software. The assistance for software engineers of this process is to identify the facts and skills that are required to advance the measurement component of software engineering from an expertise to a profession. Rather than focus on the coding phase of the development process, as has been the case historically, it is important to identify how measurement can be applied to the initial stage and to key the necessary information to the process phases. This move toward is important for three reasons. First, early detection and resolution of reliability problems save considerable time and money in software development. Second, product and process measurements must be integrated so that the communication between the two can be assessed throughout the life cycle. Third, software engineers must have complete knowledge of the role of measurement in contributing to the development of high reliability products and the processes that produce them. II. Approaches to Identifying Knowledge Requirements There are two approaches to identifying the knowledge that is compulsory to plan and implement a software reliability program. One approach is issue oriented, as shown in Table 1. The other is life cycle phase oriented. The two approaches are compatible although different views of achieving the same objective and have been provided to show the software engineer why (issue oriented) and when (phase oriented) the need for measurement arises. Issue Oriented Issues happen because there are important considerations in achieving software reliability goals at acceptable cost. Using this approach, the associations among issues, functions, and knowledge requirements are shown in Table 1. This table shows some of the important functions that would be performed by the software engineer in executing a life cycle reliability management plan, oriented to the issues in the first column; this table is not exhaustive. Software reliability is a key feature to software quality. Reliability is the property of referring how well software meets its requirements & also “the probability of failure free operation for the specified period of time in a specified environment”. Software reliability defines as the failure free operation of computer program in a specified environment for a specified time Software. Reliability is an essential attribute of software quality, in cooperation with functionality, usability, performance, serviceability, capability, install ability, maintainability, and documentation. Software Reliability is hard to attain, for the reason that the complexity of software tends to be high. Whereas any system with a high degree of complexity, as well as software, will be hard to reach a certain level of reliability, system developers tend to move forward complexity into the software layer, with the speedy growth of system size and ease of doing so by advancement the software. Despite the fact that the analyzability of software is inversely correlated to software reliability, it is straightforwardly related to other important International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Technology (ISSN : 2277-1581) Volume No.3 Issue No.12, pp : 1483-1487 01 Dec. 2014 IJSET@2014 Page 1484 factors in software quality, particularly software functionality and capability, etc. call attention to these features will be liable to include additional reliability to software. III Reliability According to IEEE, software reliability as “The capability of a system or component to perform its required functions under declared conditions for a specified period of time. The user based reliability of a program is described as the possibility that the program will give the correct output with a typical set of input data from the user background [23]. Software reliability is a branch of software quality. It relates to several areas where software quality is concerned. Therefore quantifying software reliability remains a complex problem as we don’t have a high understanding of the character of software. Reliability is considered as the possibility that a system will not fail to perform its proposed functions over a specified time period. Customers are seriously aware of the reliability of software, they are likely to be mostly unworried with the point of the reusability of the components making up the source code. Unreliability has a number of regrettable consequences and as a result for many products and services is a severe warning. For example low reliability can have inference for: