Q1. What do you mean by bathtub curve? The bathtub curve is widely used in reliability engineering.

It describes a particular form of the hazard function which comprises three parts:

The first part is a decreasing failure rate, known as early failures. The second part is a constant failure rate, known as random failures. The third part is an increasing failure rate, known as wear-out failures.

The name is derived from the cross-sectional shape of a bathtub. The bathtub curve is generated by mapping the rate of early "infant mortality" failures when first introduced, the rate of random failures with constant failure rate during its "useful life", and finally the rate of "wear out" failures as the product exceeds its design lifetime.

The initial region that begins at time zero when a customer first begins to use the product is characterized by a high but rapidly decreasing failure rate. This region is known as the Early Failure Period (also referred to as Infant Mortality Period, from the actuarial origins of the first bathtub curve plots). This decreasing failure rate typically lasts several weeks to a few months. Next, the failure rate levels off and remain roughly constant for (hopefully) the majority of the useful life of the product. This long period of a level failure rate is known as the Intrinsic Failure Period (also called the Stable Failure Period) and the constant failure rate level is called the Intrinsic Failure Rate. Note that most systems spend most of their lifetimes operating in this flat portion of the bathtub curve Finally, if units from the population remain in use long enough, the failure rate begins to increase as materials wear out and degradation failures occur at an ever increasing rate. This is the Wear out Failure Period Q2. If software does not wear out, why does it deteriorate? Software is not susceptible to the environmental maladied that cause hardware to wearout, therefore the failure rate curve for software should takethe form of the idealized curve. The

idealized curve is gross oversimplification of actual failure models for software, thats y software doesnt wear out but it does deteriorate. Q3. Why does it take so long to get software finished? Programming computers is an inherently complex process which becomes more complex as the project gets larger and more people are involved. 4. Why is development cost do high? Because it takes skills and experience and lots of people working to develop and test the software. It can take months even years to get all the code written and tested and checked. It takes a team of people to do this, and all of them are well educated and often have a lot of experience. It is not a simple overnight job. Q5. Why cant we find all errors before we give the software to our customer? You can't do everything every customer is going to do with the software in a reasonable amount of time. Q6. Why do we spend so much time and effort maintaining existing program? Because not maintaining them would lead to unfixed bugs and security flaws. If you release buggy software and make no effort to fix them, you will not have any return customers. Q7. Why do we continue to have difficulty in measuring progress as software is being developed and maintained? From the beginning of a software project, you need to define goals. You may or may not reach the goals on time, but if you start with a time line of goals, then at least you have a measuring stick.