A Decision Support System for Reliable Software Development

Reliability has become a major concern for large-scale software developers. This concern has resulted in the development of a large number of models intended to describe the failure process of software. The use of these models during development has been restricted to the later stages of integration testing. A decision support system is described here which allows for the use of existing software reliability models throughout development. The system uses information from the developer in the form of constraints on the probability distributions which describe the uncertainty associated with the parameters of the various models. Model management is data driven to allow for maximum flexibility in probability assessments which can be provided by either the user or the system.