Software reliability improvement through operational profile driven testing

One of the important features of software reliability engineering is operational profile of the software. Operational profile is used to guide the development and the testing process. Operational profile testing is effective and practical approach to software testing since it improves the reliability and speeds up the development process. In this paper a software which had undergone normal scheduled testing cycle of the company before is taken up for testing through operational profile. Operational profile of the software is developed and test cases based on the operational profile are allocated. Issue of allocation of test cases to infrequent operations is also resolved. Testing driven by operational profile is found to be effective and practical as some critical failures are observed during testing. Failure data is analyzed, reliability growth models are applied and estimates of software reliability and failure intensity are made. Software reliability demonstration chart based on consumer risk, producer risk and discrimination ratio is also prepared. Failure data of certification testing is plotted on the chart to arrive at the decision of accepting/rejecting the software with a small sample size of failure data.