Testing effort dependent software FDP and FCP models with consideration of imperfect debugging

Abstract

Software reliability can be enhanced considerably during testing with faults being detected and corrected by testers. The allocation of testing resources, such as man power and CPU hours, during testing phase can largely influence fault detection speed and the time to correct a detected fault. The testing resources allocation is usually depicted by testing effort function, which has been incorporated into software reliability models in some recent papers. Fault correction process (FCP) is usually modeled as a delayed process of fault detection process (FDP). In addition, debugging is usually not perfect and new faults can be introduced during testing. In this paper, flexible testing effort dependent paired models of FDP and FCP are derived with consideration of fault introduction. A real dataset is used to illustrate the application of proposed models. © 2010 IEEE.