A Generalized Model for Software Reliability Evaluation Based on Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process

Given the widespread usage of software systems in all aspects of modern life, the need to produce almost error free and high quality software has become more and more important. Software reliability is considered as an important approach to software quality assessment. Software reliability modeling based on non- homogeneous Poisson process is a quite successful method in software reliability engineering. In this paper, we first study the general growth model of software reliability, and then we extend the general model by considering two types of simple and complex errors, dependency between complex errors and time delay between detecting and removing complex errors. Estimating the model parameters has been done by using two failure data sets of real software projects through MATLAB software. We compare the proposed model with two existing models using various criteria. The results show that the proposed model better fits the data, providing more accurate information about the software quality.