Accounting for Realities When Estimating the Field Failure Rate of Software

  • Authors:

  • Daniel R. Jeske;Xuemei Zhang;Loan Pham

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ISSRE '01 Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

A realistic estimate of the field failure rate of software is essential in order to decide when to release the software while maintaining an appropriate balance between reliability, time-to-mar et and development cost.Typically, software reliability models are applied tosystem test data with the hope of obtaining an estimate of the software failure rate that will be observed in the field.Unfortunately, test environments are usually quite different from field environments.In this paper, we use a calibration factor to characterize the mismatch betweenthe system test environment and the field environment, and then incorporate the factor into a widely used software reliability model.For projects that have both system test data and field data for one or more previous releases, the calibration factor can be empirically evaluated and used to estimate the field failure rate of a new release based on its system test data.For newprojects, the calibration factor can be estimated by matching the software to related projects that have both system test data and field data.