Imperfect Debugging in Software Reliability: A Bayesian Approach

• Activity Number: 67
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 31, 2011 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Bayesian Statistical Science
• Author(s): Tevfik Aktekin*+
• Companies: University of New Hampshire
• Keywords: Bayesian Inference ; Software Reliability ; Imperfect Debugging ; State Space

Abstract

The objective of studying software reliability is to assist software engineers in understanding more of the probabilistic nature of software failures during the debugging stages and to construct reliability models. In this paper, we consider Bayesian modeling of the inter-failure times whose parameter space is evolving stochastically over time typically observed in software reliability applications. In doing so, we focus on the modeling of relevant parameters such as the fault detection rate per fault and the total number of faults that are both latent (unobservable) factors. We consider a model which can take into account imperfect debugging type of behavior under certain conditions. Furthermore, we investigate the existence of perfect vs. imperfect debugging in the light of data. In order to show how the proposed model work, we use real data based on which we obtain the predictive reliability functions after each testing stage, carry out inference on relevant model parameters and present additional insights from Bayesian analysis.