Censored software-reliability models

Nonfailure stops of software execution processes can be viewed as a type of censored data. They can occur in a wide range of computing systems (e.g., concurrent computing systems, data sampling systems, transaction processing systems) due to technical or nontechnical reasons. Using existing software reliability models to deal with this type of censored software reliability data, viz, successive inter-stop times, where a stop can be failure or nonfailure stop, means that nonfailure stops are disregarded. This paper develops censored software reliability models, or censored forms of existing software reliability models, to account for nonfailure stops and directly deal with censored data of software reliability. The paper shows how to develop censored forms for the models: Jelinski-Moranda, Schick-Wolverton, Moranda Geometric, and Littlewood-Verrall, and discusses the corresponding validation forms. Censored forms of other software reliability models can be developed in a similar way. Censored software reliability models reduce to noncensored software reliability models if no nonfailure stop occurs