Software faults &

reliability
Presented by:
Pooja Jain

What is Software Reliability

The

probability of failure-free
software operation for a specified
period of time in a specified
environment
It denotes a products
trustworthiness or dependability.

Software Reliability
Software

reliability not caused due to

aging but due to bugs
The more the bugs, the lesser the
reliability of the software
Still failures seem random, hence
reliability theory can be applied

Software faults
Software

is said to contain fault if for

some set of input data the output is
not correct.

Software Reliability
Software

systems often are one-of

Measuring

reliability in lab not practical

as too much failure data is needed;
requires time

Failures

often result in fault removal,

leading to reliability improvement
Predicting

future reliability from

measured reliability is harder

Hence

diferent models needed

Software Reliability Models

Jelinski

and Moranda Model

Realizes

each time an error is repaired

reliability does not increase by a
constant amount.
Reliability improvement due to fixing
of an error is assumed to be
proportional to the number of errors
present in the system at that time.

Software Reliability Models

Block

coverage model
Goel Okumoto (G-O) Imperfect
debugging model
GONHPP

Musa

Okumoto (M-O) Logarithmic

Poisson Execution Time model

Software Reliability Growth

Models
Assume

that reliability is a function

of the defect level and as defects are
removed, reliability improves

Model

parameters determined from

past data on failures and fixes

Software Failure Mechanisms

Failure cause: Software defects are mainly

design defects.
Wear-out: Software does not have energy related
wear-out phase. Errors can occur without warning.
Repairable system concept: Periodic restarts
can help fix software problems.
Time dependency and life cycle : Software
reliability is not a function of operational time.
Environmental factors: Do not afect Software
reliability, except it might afect program inputs.
Reliability prediction: Software reliability can
not be predicted from any physical basis, since it
depends completely on human factors in design.

Software Reliability Models

After

fitting a model describing the

failure process we can estimate its
parameters, and the quantities such
as the total number of faults in the
code, future failure intensity and
additional time required to achieve a
failure intensity objective.

Software fault tolerance

techniques:
are

designed to allow a system to

tolerate software faults that remain in
the system after its development

provide

mechanisms to the software

system to prevent system failure from
occurring

Multiple data representation enviroment:

Data diverse techniques are used in a multiple data

representation environment
utilize diferent representations of input data to provide
tolerance to software design faults

Multiple version software enviroment:

Design diverse techniques are used in a multiple version

software environment
use the functionally of independently developed software
versions to provide tolerance to software design faults

Design diversity
Popular

techniques which are based

on the design diversity concept for
fault tolerance in software are:

Recovery Block

N-Version Programming

N-Self-Checking Programming

Data Diversity Techniques

While the design diversity approaches to provide

fault tolerance rely on multiple versions of the
software written to the same specifications, the data
diversity approach uses only one version of the
software.

This approach relies on the observation that a

software sometime fails for certain values in the
input space and

this failure could be avoided if there is a minor

perturbation of input data which is acceptable to the
software.

Enviroment Diversity
Techniques
The

environment diversity approach requires

reexecuting the software in a diferent
environment.

Transient

faults typically occur in computer

systems due to design faults in software which
result in unacceptable and erroneous states in
the OS environment.

When

the software fails, it is restarted in a

diferent, error-free OS environment state
which is achieved by some clean up operations

Software Failure Mechanisms

Redundancy: Can not improve Software

reliability if identical software components are
used.

Interfaces: Software interfaces are purely

conceptual other & not visual.

Failure rate motivators: Usually not predictable

from analyses of separate statements.

Testing
Testing

remains main verification

activity most reliance on it
Consumes as much as half of the
total efort in a sw product
Testing: test case design, execution,
checking the results, then
debugging, fixing, retesting
Each step is expensive

Conclusions
Software

reliability is a key part in

software quality
Software reliability improvement is hard
There are no generic models.
Statistical testing should be used but it
is not easy again to implement them

Thank You!!

Any Questions?