Measuring Software Reliability in Practice: An Industry Case Study

Software reliability modeling techniques have been touted as way of measuring and tracking software systems reliability. However a number of issues make it difficult to use and apply these models in practice. In this paper we show some of the challenges and issues that we have encountered in applying these techniques to track and predict a networking software system reliability behavior at two different stages of its life cycle. Through our case study we show some of the practical solutions we have adopted to overcome these challenges. We also try to establish a relationship between the software testing phase based reliability prediction and field software reliability measurement in order to derive a systematic tracking approach.