On a software reliability growth model with error generation

This paper presents a software reliability growth model which permits the possibility of imperfect debugging of errors encountered during the testing phase of the software development process, and subsequent generation of new errors into the system. The original faults which are introduced into the software during the developmental phase are called primary errors and these are assumed to be distributed according to a nonhomogeneous Poisson Process. Imperfect debugging of primary errors results in errors called secondary errors, being introduced into the system. The authors assume in this paper that the error detection rate is affected differently by primary and by secondary errors remaining in the system. This approach generalizes another model by the authors where the detection rate is assumed equally affected by faults remaining in the software, irrespective of their types.