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Software Reliability

Software Reliability is the application of statistical techniques to data collected during system development and operation to specify, predict, estimate, and assess the reliability of software-based systems. "Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a standard, proven best practice that makes testing more reliable, faster, and cheaper. It can be applied to any system using software and to frequently-used members of software component libraries."

Software Reliability Resources:



DACS Reliability Services - Software Reliability resources available form the DACS.



Datasets and Empirical Data - Sources of software reliability datasets and empirical data.

  • DACS Software Reliability Dataset- This dataset consists of software failure data on 16 projects. The data was collected throughout the mid-1970s. It represents projects from a variety of applications including real time command and control, word processing, commercial, and military applications.


DoD Related Software Reliability Resources - Software Reliability resources created by or of special interest to the DoD community.

  • DACS Reliability Services - A PDF brochure you can download to learn more about the DACS Reliability Services.

  • Reliability Analysis Center (RAC) - The RAC is an Information Analysis Center (IAC) chartered by the Department of Defense (DoD) to serve as a Government and industry focal point to improve the reliability, maintainability, quality, and supportability of manufactured components and systems. A major emphasis of the RAC is to collect and disseminate data and information relating to reliability, maintainability, quality, supportability, and testability.

  • STSC's Software Reliability Service - This service is intended for personnel interested in advanced uses of software quality measurements to improve the development process. This service is offered by the U.S. Air Force Software Technology Support Center (STSC).

  • Software Technology for Adaptable, Reliable Systems (STARS) - The STARS program is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). STARS is focused on accelerating a change in the way software is developed within the DoD. This change represents a shift to a product line approach/technology paradigm that is process driven, domain specific, reuse based, and technology supported. The STARS goal is to increase software productivity, reliability, and quality by integrating support for modern software development processes and reuse concepts within Software Engineering Environment (SEE) technology.



Education, Training, and Conferences - Courses, seminars, conferences, training products, and resources for learning about software reliability.

  • IEEE Reliability Society Tutorial Videos - This page has everything from short courses to advanced degree programs. Sample titles include Developing Reliable Software in the Shortest Cycle Time and Developing Software for Safety Critical Systems.

  • RAC System Software Reliability Training Course - This training course is tailored for reliability engineers, systems engineers, quality assurance engineers, and software engineers and testers. Featuring hands-on software reliability measurement, analyses and design, it is intended for those individuals responsible for measuring, analyzing, designing, automating, implementing or ensuring software reliability for either commercial or government programs.



Software Reliability Experts - People who have established themselves as experts in the field of Software Reliability.

  • Anderson, Ross At the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, his interests include; Privacy and freedom issues, Information hiding, Reliability of security systems, and cryptographic protocols. He is also the editor of `Computer and Communications Security Reviews'.

  • Basili, Victor Dr. Basili is a professor at the University of Maryland, Dr. Basili is a noted advocate and practitioner of quantitative methods in software engineering. He was a co-founder of NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory and has won numerous awards. His Web page provides pointers to the journals and organizations with which he is associated, as well as papers and other descriptions of his research interests.

  • Bowen, Jonathan Dr. Bownen is a Professor of Computing, at the Centre for Applied Formal Methods, SCISM, South Bank University, London.

  • Fenton, Norman Norman Fenton is Professor of Computing at Queen Mary and Westfield College (London University) and is also Managing Director of Agena, a company that specializes in risk management for critical systems.

  • Hamlet, Dick Professor, Department of Computer Science, Portland State University. Professor Hamlet received his Ph.D., Computer Science from University of Washington in 1971. His research interests include; software engineering, software engineering education, software testing, software reliability, and text processing.

  • Littlewood, Bev Professor Littlewood is known for critical work in software reliability, including the development of models and modeling techniques to illustrate his theories. He founded the Centre for Software Reliability, of which he is Director, and is Professor of Software Engineering at City University (London).

  • Martin L. Shooman Dr. Shooman's research is in Software Engineering, Software and Hardware liability and fault- tolerant components. Dr. Shooman developed first software reliability model in 1970 and is well known nationally and internationally for his research and consulting in Software Engineering and Reliability. He is a fellow of the IEEE. Dr. Shooman is a DACS' research partner. E-Mail: shooman@rama.poly.edu

  • Mellor, Peter Mr. Mellor is a lecturer in Information Technology at Centre for Software Reliability (CSR). His interests include practical aspects of software dependability measurement particularly data collection; safety-critical systems, particularly civil avionics; standardization of software dependability assessment methods; and definitions of dependability terms. E-Mail: p.mellor@csr.city.ac.uk

  • Moffett, John A lecturer and Course Coordinator of the Advanced MSc courses in the Department of Computer Science, University of York, Dr Moffett teaches the Computer Systems Security and Operation, Management and Maintenance modules of the MSc courses. He is a member of the High Integrity Systems Engineering group, Moderator of the Safety-Critical Mailing List Forum, and Custodian of the Dependability References Database.

  • Musa, John John D. Musa teaches courses and consults in software reliability engineering and testing. He has been involved in software reliability engineering since 1973 and is generally recognized as one of the creators of that field. Recently, he was Technical Manager of Software Reliability Engineering at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill. He organized and led the transfer of software reliability engineering into practice within AT&T, spearheading the effort that defined it as a "best current practice." Musa has also been actively involved in research to advance the theory and practice of software reliability engineering. He has published more than 100 articles and papers, given more than 175 major presentations, and made several videos. He is principal author of Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application and author of Software Reliability Engineering: More Reliable Software, Faster Development and Testing.

  • Schneidewind, Norman F. Dr. Schneidewind is Professor of Information Sciences and Director of the Software Metrics Research Center in the Division of Computer and Information Sciences and Operations at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he teaches and performs research in software engineering and computer networks. Dr. Schneidewind is a Fellow of the IEEE, elected in 1992 for contributions to software measurement models in reliability and metrics, and for leadership in advancing the field of software maintenance. He is the developer of the Schneidewind software reliability model that is used by NASA to assist in the prediction of software reliability of the Space Shuttle, by the Naval Surface Warfare Center for Trident software reliability prediction, and by the Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity for distributed system software reliability assessment and prediction. This model is one of the models recommended by the American National Standards Institute and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Recommended Practice for Software Reliability. In addition, the model is implemented in the Statistical Modeling and Estimation of Reliability Functions for Software (SMERFS), software reliability-modeling tool. He has published widely in the fields of software reliability and metrics.

  • Smidts, Carol A professor at the University of Maryland, Dr. Smidts' research areas focus on dynamic probabilistic risk assessment, human reliability, software reliability, quantitative risk assessment, and software testing.

  • University of Maryland's Software Reliability Engineering Center's Staff



Literature - Articles, papers, books, technical reports and other Software Reliability literature.

  • A Summary of Software Reliability Engineering - This brief resource by John D. Musa, provides a gentle introduction to Software Reliability Engineering (SRE).

  • Technical Reports
    • A History of Software Measurement at Rome Laboratory: Reliability Model Validation These efforts focused mainly on the validation and evaluation of reliability models, rather than on development of new models.

    • Arcadia Software Architecture Papers Arcadia is a research project investigating tools and techniques to improve the software engineering process. The goal of the project is to support the creation of software engineering environments intended for the development, analysis, and maintenance of large, complex software systems, particularly those with high reliability requirements.

    • DACS Software Reliability Sourcebook - The DACS Software Reliability Sourcebook is intended to meet the need for basic Software Reliability techniques and available resources into one concise handbook.

    • Dependency Characterization in Path-Based Approaches to Architecture-Based Software Reliability Prediction Predicting reliability of an application early in the life-cycle, taking into account the information about its architecture, testing and reliabilities of its components, is absolutely essential.

    • Important Milestones in Software Reliability Modeling In this paper, the authors discuss the time-domain and data-domain approaches to software reliability modeling, and classify the previously reported models into these two classes based on their underlying assumptions.

    • Reliability Simulation of Fault-Tolerant Software and Systems In this paper, the authors develop algorithms to simulate the failure behavior of three commonly used fault tolerant architectures, Distributed Recovery Block (DRB), N-Version Programming (NVP) and N-Self Checking Programming (NSCP).

    • SREPT: Software Reliability Estimation and Prediction Tool This paper presents the high-level design of a Software Reliability Estimation and Prediction Tool (SREPT), that offers a unified framework consisting of techniques (including the architecture-based approach) to assist in the evaluation of software reliability during all phases of the software life-cycle.

    • STARS Guide to Integration of Object Oriented Methods and Cleanroom Software Engineering by William Ett and Carmen Trammell - The February 1996 version of the guidebook was revised to include sections covering (1) the description of the Object Modeling Technique (OMT) and OMT's association with Rational's Unified Modeling Language, and (2) guidance for enhancing the OMT method with Cleanroom techniques and processes.

    • Software Engineering Baselines The purpose of this report is to provide baseline information about a selected set of metrics, specifically productivity, complexity, and reliability. It is not a comprehensive treatment of metrics; indeed, that subject is treated in a number of texts and DoD initiatives including the Joint Logistics Commanders' Practical Software Measurement (PSM) program, the SEI's Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis (SEMA) program (Carleton 92), and the U.S. Army's Software Test and Evaluation Panel (STEP) metrics.

    • Structure-Based Software Reliability Prediction In this report the authors outline the constituents of several software reliability growth models. They then present an exhaustive analyses of the classes of methods where the architecture of the application is modeled either as a discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) or a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC), and illustrate these methods using examples.

    • Tactical Software Reliability (TSR) Guidebook TSR is a methodology that complements Software Process Improvement (SPI) and addresses tactical issues. It is designed to significantly improve a target software product within one year or less.

    • Techniques for Modeling the Reliability of Fault-Tolerant Systems with the Markov State-Space Approach This paper presents a step-by-step tutorial of the methods and the tools that were used for the reliability analysis of fault-tolerant systems. The approach used in this paper is the Markov (or semi-Markov) state-space method. The paper is intended for design engineers with a basic understanding of computer architecture and fault tolerance, but little knowledge of reliability modeling. The representation of architectural features in mathematical models is emphasized. This paper does not present details of the mathematical solution of complex reliability models. NASA RP-1348, September 1995.

    • The Present Value of Software Maintenance Deciding to engage in a software project typically results in incurring costs and generating revenues over a long time period. Introducing new technology into the software process can likewise be considered an investment decision. This paper presents capital budgeting techniques employed among financial analysts and upper-level management to evaluate such investment decisions.

  • Articles and White Papers

  • Books- These can be purchased from any major book distributor. Title, author, publisher, and ISBN number are listed for your convenience.

    • Software Reliability Determination for Conventional and Logic Programming by Alireza Azem Walter de Gruyter, Inc. ISBN: 3110148072. 1995.

    • Applied Software Measurement: Assuring Productivity and Quality by T. Capers Jones McGraw Hill Text. ISBN: 0070328269. 1996.

    • Ensuring Software Reliability by Ann Marie Neufelder Marcel Dekker Incorporated. ISBN: 0-8247-8762-5.

    • Handbook of Software Reliability Engineering by Michael R. Lyu Computer Society Press. ISBN: 0-07-039400-8. 1996.

    • Measuring the Software Process: Statistical Process Control for Software Process Improvement by William A. Florac and Anita D. Carleton The SEI Series in Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN: 0201604442. 1999.

    • Software Engineering: Design, Reliability, and Management by Martin L. Shooman McGraw-Hill Computer Science Series. ISBN 0-07-057021-3. 1983.

    • Software Reliability Engineering: More Reliable Software, Faster Development and Testing by John D. Musa McGraw Hill Text; ISBN: 0079132715. 1998.

    • Software Reliability Handbook by Paul Rook Elsevier Science. ISBN: 1851664009. 1990.

    • Software Reliability Modelling and Identification: Tutorial Papers by Sergio Bittanti Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. ISBN: 0387506950. 1988.

    • Software Reliability and Testing by Hoang Pham (Ed.) IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN: 0818668520. 1995.

    • Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application by John D. Musa, Anthony Iannino, and Kazuhira Okumoto McGraw-Hill Series in Software Engineering and Technology, College Division. ISBN: 007044093X. 1987.

    • Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application by John D. Musa, Anthony Iannino, and Kazuhira Okumoto The McGraw-Hill Companies. ISBN: 007044093X. 1986.

    • Software Reliability by Hoang Pham Springer-Verlag New York, Incorporated. ISBN: 9813083840. 1999.

    • The Handbook of Software Quality Assurance by G. Gordon Schulmeyer (Editor), et. al. Prentice Hall. 3rd Edition. ISBN: 0130104701. 1998.

  • Journals
    • Software Quality Institute's (SQI) Newsletter Archive This is an archive of the newsletters published by the SQI of the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

    • Software Quality Journal The Journal addresses all aspects of software quality from both a practical and an academic viewpoint. It invites contributions from practitioners and academics, as well as national and international policy and standard making bodies, and sets out to be the definitive international reference source for such information. Published by Kluwer by subscription; sample copy available.

    • Software Testing, Verification & Reliability The aim and scope of this publication is to document and foster new and useful techniques, methodologies and standards in the software testing, verification and reliability fields; to act as a reference for practicable approaches to problems; to promote the development and dissemination of sound theoretical foundations for new and established practice; and to provide a forum for informed debate on the abundant controversial issues. STVR is published quarterly by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. on a subscription basis, sample copy available. ISSN: 0960-0833.



Models and Tools

  • Galorath Inc. (also known as GA SEERTM Technologies) Galorath provides a comprehensive set of decision-support and production optimization tools. Consulting and support services are available for these tools. The tools help manage product design and manufacturing operations, driving out costs and building in quality. The tools derive cost, schedule, labor and materials estimates by assessing the interaction and impact of product, organizational and even operational variables.

  • Goel-Okumoto Software Reliability Model An automated version of the Goel-Okumoto Nonhomogeneous Poisson Process Software Reliability Model which runs on an IBM-PC. Distributed by the DACS.

  • Quantitative Software Management (QSM) Lawrence Putnam is the president of QSM. QSM offers their clients Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) processes and tools for software cost estimating, reliability modeling, schedule estimating, planning, tracking, and benchmarking.

  • Reliability & Maintenance Analyst This software consists of two modules; a life data analysis module and a maintenance optimization module.



Organizations - Groups, programs, and organizations interested in software reliability.

  • Bell Canada Software Reliability Laboratory - Their research focuses on two areas of reliability. The first is software supervision, which addresses ways of detecting failure in executing software. Secondly, we are looking at reliability in distributed systems. This examines issues related to systems using an unreliable communications medium such as the internet.

  • CU Arcadia Arcadia is a research project investigating tools and techniques to improve the software engineering process. The goal of the project is to support the creation of software engineering environments intended for the development, analysis, and maintenance of large, complex software systems, particularly those with high reliability requirements. Additionally, Arcadia is committed to a highly distributed, tool-based architecture that supports flexible environment evolution, heterogeneous tools, and organizationally dispersed software engineering.

  • Center for Advanced Computing and Communication - The Center for Advanced Computing and Communication (CACC) is an industry/university/government cooperative research center at North Carolina State University at Raleigh and Duke University at Durham. CACC is sponsored jointly by NC State University, Duke University and participating government agencies and private corporations.

  • Centre for Software Reliability The CSR at City University (London), is an independent Research Centre founded in 1983. CSR's research aims at giving industry sound methods for evaluating and predicting software dependability, and for choosing the methods used to achieve dependability. It seeks factual, scientific bases for decision making in software and systems engineering.

  • Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) The CSR is a research center within the Department of Computing Science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; it conducts research on how to achieve improved levels of dependability from computing systems.

  • Colorado State University Testing & Reliability Research Group - The continuing research is focussed on developing techniques for achieving and evaluating ultra-high reliability in computational systems.

  • High Integrity Software System Assurance (HISSA) HISSA is a part of the Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The HISSA project provides technology to produce high integrity, affordable software for productive use.

  • NASA's Software Assurance Technology Center (SATC) The Software Assurance Technology Center (SATC) was established in 1992 in the Systems Reliability and Safety Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center(GSFC). The SATC was founded to become a NASA center of excellence in software assurance, dedicated to making measurable improvement in the quality and reliability of software developed for GSFC and NASA.

  • Reliability Analysis Center (RAC) The RAC is an Information Analysis Center (IAC) chartered by the Department of Defense (DoD) to serve as a Government and industry focal point to improve the reliability, maintainability, quality, and supportability of manufactured components and systems. A major emphasis of the RAC is to collect and disseminate data and information relating to reliability, maintainability, quality, supportability, and testability.

  • Software Productivity Consortium The Software Productivity Consortium is a unique, nonprofit partnership of industry, government, and academia. They develop processes, methods, tools, and supporting services to help their members and affiliates build high quality, component-based systems, and continuously advance their systems and software engineering maturity pursuant to the guidelines of all of the major process and quality frameworks. Membership is open to all U.S. or Canadian-based companies, government agencies, and academic organizations.

  • Software Quality Institute (SQI) Founded in 1993 to meet the educational needs of software professionals, the SQI is the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austinıs answer to the software industryıs demand for lifelong learning solutions that are flexible, innovative, and made a significant contribution to professional competitiveness. Through innovative teaching, SQI informs and educates software producers and users about issues vital to the production and application of high-quality software. SQI specializes in practitioner-to-practitioner training with an emphasis on hands-on practical workshops.



Service Providers - Organizations and corporations offering software reliability products and services.

  • Espinoza Consulting - Espinoza Consulting specializes in software development, reliability engineering, statistical methods and maintenance engineering. Their staff members are nationally recognized as experts in their fields, and have written several text books and commercial software packages.

  • Quantitative Software Management (QSM) - QSM offers their clients Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) processes and tools for software cost estimating, reliability modeling, schedule estimating, planning, tracking, and benchmarking. Lawrence Putnam is the president of QSM.

  • ReliaSoft Corporation - Reliability Software, Training, Consulting and Related Services from ReliaSoft Corporation - ReliaSoft Corporation provides reliability software, reliability training, consulting and services for reliability engineering and related fields.

  • Reliable: The Quality Company - Description: Reliable is a leading independent software testing company offering QA, functional testing,performance testing, usability testing and security testing solutions. Reliable provides a comprehensive set of testing solutions, from specific expertise to full outsourcing, that is designed to meet the business goals of clients worldwide. Reliable is dedicated to providing cost effective testing solutions that help clients reduce the risk associated with the implementation and ongoing operation of systems and software driven business solutions. Specializing in test strategy, planning, risk assessment, configuration management and all phases of test design, Reliable assists clients in achieving their information technology goals.

  • STSC's Software Reliability Service - This service is intended for personnel interested in advanced uses of software quality measurements to improve the development process. This service is offered by the U.S. Air Force Software Technology Support Center (STSC).

  • SoHaR Incorporated - SoHaR's organizational mission is the research and development of dependable computing for critical applications.

  • Software Process and Reliability Engineering (SPRE) - SPRE is a consulting firm focusing on integrating SRE into software development processes. Highlights of services include: project jump starts, tailoring of SRE tools, operational profiles, and training in SRE.



Related Topics- Software Engineering topics that are closely related to Software Reliability.

  • Software Quality - A definition of quality should emphasize three important points: 1.) Software requirements are the foundation from which quality is measured. Lack of conformance to requirement is lack of quality. 2.) Specified standards define a set of development criteria that guide the manner in which software is engineered. If the criteria are not followed, lack of quality will almost surely result. 3.) There is a set of implicit requirements that often goes unmentioned (e.g. good maintainability). If software conforms to its explicit requirements but fails to meet implicit requirements, software quality is suspect.

  • Software Safety - Computer software has impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, and so has the amount of critical software. When software annunciates safety-critical information to the human-in-the-loop or controls a system subsystem that could contribute to the loss of life, property or environment, software safety is a concern. Software system safety is a process whereby potential software or software environmental causal factors contributing to system hazards are identified, analyzed, and mitigated according to their hazard priority.

  • Software Testing - The purpose of software testing is to assess and evaluate the quality of work performed at each step of the software development process. Although it sometimes seems that way, the purpose of testing is NOT to use up all the remaining budget or schedule resources at the end of a development effort. The goal of testing is to ensure that the software performs as intended, and to improve software quality, reliability and maintainability.


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