Queueing-Based Simulation for Software Reliability Analysis

As modern software system is growing in size and complexity, the customer expectations for software quality have become higher. In the past, many software reliability growth models (SRGMs) were proposed and they are helped to evaluate the quality of developed software. It is worth noting that some of SRGMs can be used to model the fault detection process (FDP) and the fault correction process (FCP) through an infinite server queueing (ISQ) system or a finite server queueing (FSQ) system. However, it can also be found that most ISQ and FSQ models were developed on a first come first served basis. In this paper, we propose to use the queueing-based simulations to describe the behavior of FCP and assess the software reliability instead of using model-based approaches. Our proposed queueing-based simulation techniques and simulation procedures will be able to thoroughly investigate the FCP and easily provide system performance information estimated based on the staffing level, the average response time, and the average waiting time. Numerical examples based on three real failure data are given and discussed. Our experiments show that the proposed simulation procedures obtain a good prediction capability for software reliability. We expect that the proposed methods can provide effective information for software developing management and help decision makers in resource allocation and cost control.