Software Reliability Virtual Testing for Reliability Assessment

The basic condition of software reliability assessment is failure time, which must be acquired during a test based on operational profile or on real usage. Failure data from software development or other non-software reliability testing (SRT) cannot be used for reliability evaluation because such data do not include usage information and failure time. This paper presents a software reliability virtual test (SRVT), which constructs the software input space model and the known failure input space model through which possible failure time can be determined by matching the randomly generate inputs. An experiment comparing SRT and SRVT with different thresholds lambda is introduced to verify SRVT. Results indicate that SRVT saves a large amount of testing time while providing reliability assessment with acceptable accuracy.