A Comparative Analysis of Software Reliability Growth Models using Defects Data of Closed and Open Source Software

The purpose of this study is to compare the fitting (goodness of fit) and prediction capability of eight Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGM) using fifty different failure Data sets. These data sets contain defect data collected from system test phase, operational phase (field defects) and Open Source Software (OSS) projects. The failure data are modelled by eight SRGM (Musa Okumoto, Inflection S-Shaped, Goel Okumoto, Delayed S-Shaped, Logistic, Gompertz, Yamada Exponential, and Generalized Goel Model). These models are chosen due to their prevalence among many software reliability models. The results can be summarized as follows: Fitting capability: Musa Okumoto fits all data sets, but all models fit all the OSS datasets. : Prediction capability: Musa Okumoto, Inflection S-Shaped and Goel Okumoto are the best predictors for industrial data sets, Gompertz and Yamada are the best predictors for OSS data sets. : Fitting and prediction capability: Musa Okumoto and Inflection are the best performers on industrial datasets. However this happens only on slightly more than 50% of the datasets. Gompertz and Inflection are the best performers for all OSS datasets.