PurposeThe Gompertz curve has been used in industry to estimate the number of remaining software faults. This paper aims to introduce a family of distributions for fitting software failure times which subsumes the Gompertz distribution.Design/methodology/approachThe mean value function of the corresponding non-homogenous Poisson process software reliability growth model is presented. Model parameters are estimated by the method of maximum likelihood. A comparison of the new model with eight models that use well-known failure time distributions of exponential, gamma, Rayleigh, Weibull, Gompertz, half normal, log-logistic and lognormal is performed according to the several statistical and informational criteria. Moreover, a Shannon entropy approach is used for ranking and model selection.FindingsNumerical experiments are implemented on five real software failure datasets varying from small to large datasets. The results exhibit that the proposed model is promising and particularly outperforms the Gompertz model in all considered datasets.Originality/valueThe proposed model provides optimized reliability estimation.
What do the software reliability growth model parameters represent?
