Keynote Speech: Design Testing and Evaluation Techniques for Software Reliability Engineering

Software reliability is closely influenced by the creation, manifestation and impact of software faults. Consequently, software reliability can be improved by treating software faults properly, using techniques of fault tolerance, fault removal, and fault prediction. Fault tolerance techniques achieve the design for reliability, fault removal techniques achieve the testing for reliability, and fault prediction techniques achieve the evaluation for reliability. In this paper we present best current practices in software reliability engineering for the design, testing, and evaluation purposes. We describe how fault tolerant components can be applied in software applications, how software testing can be conducted to show improvement of software reliability, and how software reliability can be modeled and measured for complex systems. We also examine the associated tools for applying these techniques.