A decision support system for software reliability engineering strategy selection

This decision support system was built to assist project managers to design and tailor the software development process to their specific projects for achieving required software reliability values. The decision support system has two subsystems: a knowledge-based expert system for reliability engineering strategy selection and a process simulator for strategy assessment. We present here the knowledge-based component for strategy selection assistance. The paper describes the framework for identifying software reliability engineering practices and the decision factors for selecting a subset of practices appropriate for the project, taking into account various project constraints. After identifying heuristics for making the selection decisions, we have developed a knowledge base and implemented an expert system to help a less experienced project manager with engineering the process in a product quality driven manner. The expert system is a rule based fuzzy logic system, developed by using the off-the-shelf FuzzyCLIPS shell