Pham H. System Software Reliability

Springer, 2006. — 442 p.This book aims to present the state-of-the-art of system software reliability in theory and practice and recent research on this subject over the last five years. It is a textbook based mainly on the author’s recent research and publications as well as experience of 20 years in this field. The topics covered are organized as follows:
Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to system software reliability and basic terminologies used throughout the book. This chapter also identifies the literature available in the area of software reliability engineering.
Chapter 2 discusses the concepts of system reliability engineering, systemability, various reliability aspects of systems with multiple failure modes, and the stochastic processes including the Markov process, renewal process, quasi-renewal process, and nonhomogeneous Poisson process.
Chapter 3 describes the theory of estimation, common estimation techniques and confidence interval estimates.
Chapter 4 presents the basic concepts of software engineering assessment including software lifecycle, software development process and its applications, software testing concepts, and data analysis.
Chapter 5 discusses various groups of traditional software reliability models and methods for evaluating software reliability and other performance measures, such as software complexity and the number of remaining errors.
Chapter 6 comprehensively covers software reliability models for the failure phenomenon based on the nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP). The generalized NHPP model, model selection and the software mean time between failures are also discussed.
Chapter 7 discusses various software reliability models addressing testing coverage and fault removal.
Chapter 8 describes some recent studies on environmental factors and the impact of these factors on software reliability assessment. Several software reliability models that incorporate environmental factors are also discussed.
Chapter 9 discusses calibrating software reliability modelling research on how to quantify the mismatch between the system test environment and the field environment.
Chapter 10 discusses some software cost models based on the NHPP addressing warranty issues and risk costs due to software failures. This chapter also discusses a generalized gain model under random field environments. Various optimal release policies of the software systems, that is when to conclude testing and release the software, are also presented.
Chapter 11 is devoted to the basic concepts of fault-tolerant software system modeling and other advanced techniques including self-checking schemes. The reliability analysis of fault-tolerant software schemes such as recover block, N-version programming, and hybrid fault-tolerant systems are presented. This chapter also discusses a triple-version programming reliability model with common failures. A brief mathematical reliability analysis of complex systems considering hardware and software interaction failures is also discussed.