A technique for early software reliability prediction

In early developmental stages of software, failure data is not available to determine the reliability of software. But developers need reliability prediction for quality assessment and resource planning. We propose a model based on Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) for representing real-world problems and an algorithm for analysis of these models in early phase of software development. We have named this technique Early Reliability Analysis Technique (ERAT). We have performed several simulations on randomly generated software models to compute reliabilities and sensitivity. The simulation result shows that reliabilities are good quality indicator and sensitivity of system reliability to functions reliability can be determined.