Exploitation of Quantitative Approaches to Software Reliability

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Software reliability is one of the main factors to measure the quality of software. Since software errors cause spectacular failures in some cases, we need to measure the reliability factor to determine the quality of software product, predict reliability in the future, and use it for planning resources needed to fix failures. Software reliability models are applicable tools to analyze software in order to evaluate the reliability of software. During the past twenty five years, more than fifty different models have been proposed for estimating software reliability but many of software practitioners do not know how to utilize these models to evaluate their products. In this paper we will present a survey on different models of software reliability and their characteristics. We will propose taxonomy of different models and try to aid the comprehension of these models for practitioners, developers, and users. In the last section we apply some of these models on two different open source projects and compare the results. * The work is the result of a class project. Because of some external requests who would like to cite this work properly, the report is converted into a technical report as is without any obligation until it can be formally organized and edited with adequate citations.