A New Analysis Concept in Applying Software Reliability Growth Models and Tool Implementation: The SafeMan

Abstract

In recent years, many software development organizations have been assessing and analyzing their software product’s reliability/quality and judging whether the software product is releasable by using Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) at the final stage of software development. The usage of SRGMs originates in the advantage that various reliability analysis results based on the SRGMs can be acquired easily. However, it is very difficult for general software project managers to grasp the achievement level of reliability/quality based on its analysis results because some sort of professional knowledge is required in order to understand the information on the attainment progress of software product’s reliability/quality. Moreover, it is also difficult for software project managers and inspectors who do not deeply comprehend the details of their project to evaluate the degree of software reliability and quality, if they assess it without grasping the live development situation and only see the documents submitted from their staff. In this paper, we propose a new analysis concept for assessing the software product’s reliability/quality, and illustrate the output results obtained by a tool, the SafeMan.