Toward a Unified Approach to Software Reliability Modeling under Imperfect Debugging

Many software reliability growth models (SRGMs) have been developed to estimate some useful measures such as the mean value function, number of remaining faults, and failure detection rate. Most of these models have focused on the failure detection process and not given equal priority to modeling the fault correction process. But, most latent software errors may remain uncorrected for a long time even after they are detected, which increases their impact. The remaining software faults are often one of the most unreliable reasons for software quality. Therefore, we develop a general framework of the modeling of the failure detection and fault correction processes. Furthermore, it is assumed that a detected fault is immediately removed and is perfectly repaired with no new faults being introduced for the traditional SRGMs. In reality, it is impossible to remove all faults from the fault correction process and have a fault-free effect on the software development environment. In order to relax this perfect debugging assumption, we introduce the possibility of imperfect debugging phenomenon. Finally, numerical examples are shown to illustrate the results of the unified approach for integration of the detection and correction process under imperfect debugging.