Fault reparation time estimation based on exponential distribution function and software instability metric

Software maintenance phase contains modifying, training and help supporting. In this phase when faults occur, users will notify the problem to software maintenance team. The team has to provide the users the estimated fault reparation time and then fix the problems. Fault reparation time of different kinds of faults may be varied due to fault types and program instability. In this research, an estimation model for fault reparation time is proposed. The exponential probability density function and an instability metric are mainly used to construct the estimation model. The estimation model is exercised with some open source software projects. The experiment result shows the model constructed by applying both theory of exponential distribution and instability metric is significantly better than the model constructed by applying only theory of exponential distribution.