Software Shipping Time Estimation for Markovian Change-Point Reliability Model

Abstract

A Markovian software reliability model is known as one of the useful models which enable us to describe the details on the dynamic behavior of software reliability growth process with imperfect debugging activities. As the application of this model for software development management, we discuss software shipping time estimation based on the extended Markovian software reliability model considering with the effect of change-point, which is the testing-time when the characteristic of the software failure-occurrence or fault-detection phenomenon changes notably. Especially in our discussion on the software shipping time estimation, we derive an analytical software shipping policy under certain software reliability objective and show numerical examples of the application of the software shipping policy by using actual software reliability data. Finally, we give some useful consideration on the relationship between the software shipping time and the software reliability growth process for conducing quality-oriented software development management.