Software Reliability

Definition

Reliability is the probability of failure-

free operation of a system over a
specified time within a specified
environment for a specified purpose.
 Introduction

It gives the measure of :

 How much system matches with stated

specifications?
 How well the system provides the
required services?
 Introduction

 It is difficult to define Reliability Term Objectively ,

also to measure the user’s expectations or
environmental factors

 While considering reliability , Important factor to

discuss is about the System’s Failure.

 All failures are not equal ; some of them gives very

serious consequences or some failures are reasonably
Failures and Faults
 Failure : Unexpected runtime
behaviour observed by a user of the
software.

 Fault : This is Static software

characteristic which causes a failure
to occur.
Failures and Faults
 Every Fault does not lead to the failure
 Examples :
 Code which mostly correct
 Dead or infrequently used code
 If user can not notice the wrong behaviour , its
not a Fault.
 If a user expects Wrong Behaviour , it’s not a
Fault
Improving Reliability

 Fixing N% of the faults does not mean that

lead to an N% reliability improvement.

 One of the study showed that removing 60%

of software faults led to a 3% reliability

improvement.
Types of Failures

Hardware Failure

Software Failure
Types of Failures
 Hardware Failures : Mostly always physical failures.

 Software Failures : Due to design faults.

 Hardware reliability metrics are not much

appropriate to measure software reliability but that is

how they have evolved.

Reliability metrics
 Reliability metrics are used to quantitatively expressed
the reliability of the software product.
 The parameter to be used to measure the reliability
depends upon the type of system & the requirements of
the application domain.
 It is difficult to find a suitable method to measure
software reliability.
 The reliability cannot be measured directly
 It is not like something gets measured and that gets
reflected as reliability.
Reliability metrics
Metrics

 Product metrics : Are those which are used to build the

artefacts.
 Artefacts such as requirement specification documents, system
design documents, etc.

 Project Management Metrics : Project characteristics and

execution.
 If there is proper management of the project by the
programmer, then this helps us to achieve better
products.

 A relationship exists between the development process and

the ability to complete projects on time and within the
desired quality objectives.
Metrics

 Process Metrics : Process metrics quantify useful

attributes of the software development process & its
environment.

 They tell if the process is functioning optimally as

they report on characteristics like cycle time &
rework time.

 The goal of process metric is to do the right job on

the first time through the process.
Metrics
 Fault and Failure Metrics :

 A fault is a defect in a program which

appears when the programmer makes an
error and causes failure when executed
under particular conditions.
 These metrics are used to determine the
failure-free execution software.
Product Matrices
 Here measurements are taken from the actual
body of the source code

 Software size : considered to be complexity,

development effort, and reliability

 Lines of Code (LOC), or LOC in

thousands (KLOC), is an initial approach to
measure the software size.
 The basis of LOC is that program length can be used as a
predictor of program characteristics such as effort &ease
of maintenance.

 It is a measure of the functional complexity of the

program and is independent of the programming
language.
Product Matrices

 Function point metric is a technique to measure the

functionality of proposed software development based
on the count of inputs, outputs, master files, inquires,
and interfaces.

 Test coverage metric size fault and reliability by

performing tests on software products, assuming that
software reliability is a function of the portion of software
that is successfully verified or tested.
Product Matrices
 Complexity is directly linked to software reliability, so
representing complexity is essential. Complexity-oriented
metrics is a way of determining the complexity of a
program's control structure by simplifying the code into a
graphical representation. The representative metric is
McCabe's Complexity Metric.
 Quality metrics measure the quality at various steps of
software product development. An vital quality metric
is Defect Removal Efficiency (DRE). DRE provides a
measure of quality because of different quality assurance
and control activities applied throughout the
development process.
Project Management Metrics

 A relationship exists between the development process

and the ability to complete projects on time and within
the desired quality objectives.

 Cost increase when developers use inadequate methods.

Higher reliability can be achieved by using a better
development process, risk management process,
configuration management process.
Project Management Metrics

 These metrics are:

 Number of software developers

 Staffing pattern over the life-cycle of the
software
 Cost and schedule
 Productivity
Process Metrics
 Process metrics describe the effectiveness and quality of
the processes that produce the software product.

 The effort required in the process

 Time to produce the product
 Effectiveness of defect removal during development
 Number of defects found during testing
 Maturity of the process
Fault and Failure Metrics

 These metrics are used to determine the failure-free

execution software.

 To achieve this objective, a number of faults found during

testing and the failures or other problems which are
reported by the user after delivery are collected,
summarized, and analyzed.
 Failure metrics are based upon customer information
regarding faults found after release of the software.

 The failure data collected is therefore used to calculate

failure density, Mean Time between Failures (MTBF), or
other parameters to measure or predict software
reliability.
Example
 Product :
1. Design features are good or not ?
2. Outlook is good or not ?
3. Is it giving comfort to the user or not ?
4. Is it attractive enough to use by the customer ?
Performance gets checked

This gets checked in this type of metrics

Example
 Process

1. How much effective is the implemented process is ?

2. Is it capable for completing the task or not ?

3. Quality of the process gets measured

4. Is it following deadlines?

5. Is it matured model ? Checks appropriate outputs are

coming or not ?
Example
 Project :

1. Team size
2. Staff coordination
3. Productivity of the staff
Example
 Fault & Failure

1. Programming Error

2. a number of faults found during testing

3. The failures or other problems which are reported

by the user
Process Metrics
 Process : Focuses on each step to be followed during
software product development

 It is long term

 Main Goal is to get a good quality of Product

References
 Material drawn from [Somerville, Mancoridis],
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~spiros/teaching/CS576/slides
/9.reliability.pdf

 https://www.javatpoint.com/software-engineering-
software-reliability-measurement-techniques