Software Reliability and Performance
The dependence of the society on electronic computers has increased dramatically since its advent, and today virtually any industry -- automotive, avionics, oil, telecommunications, banking, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals is entirely dependent on the computers for its basic functioning. The size and complexity of these computer-intensive systems has increased more rapidly in the past decade, than our ability to design, test, implement and maintain them. The computer industry has seen uneven progress. With the steadily growing power and reliability of the hardware, software has been identified as a major stumbling block in achieving high levels of system dependability. Software has been a difficult beast to tame -- the literature is replete with several examples where disastrous failures leading to huge loss of life and property can be attributed to software. When lives and fortunes depend on software, assurance of its quality becomes an issue of critical concern.
Software reliability is one of the key attributes of software quality, a multidimensional property which includes other customer satisfaction factors such as functionality, usability, performance, serviceability, capability, maintainability, etc. The emphasis of this project is to develop and validate techniques to analyze its reliability, and aid maintenance. The efforts are focussed in the following areas:
1. Incorporating coverage measurements into the black-box software reliability growth models.
2. Developing models with explicit debugging activities, to obtain realistic estimates of the residual number of faults, failure rate, reliability, etc., of the software. These estimates would take into consideration the time and resources expended in debugging.
3. Prediction of software quality based on the static complexity metrics.
4. Architecture-based software reliability prediction.
5. Development and application of simulation techniques.
6. Developing techniques to aid maintaneance activities such as debugging and enhancement.
- Bell Communications Research
- Software Engineering Research Center, Purdue University
- Charles Stark Draper Labs
Aspects of this project are in collabration with:
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