Data stability in an application of a software reliability model

The Goel-Okumoto (1979) model of reliability growth is applied to the failure data for a large software development project. This is done by fitting the model parameters to the error counts and test times, which are periodically tabulated. In the early phases of system testing, the problem of inaccurate estimation due to insufficient reliability growth occurs. A simple test is devised to measure the stability of the data with respect to this problem. In practice, such a test on the data can be used to determine when system testing has sufficiently progressed to allow one to expect reasonable estimates from reliability growth models.<
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