Software reliability and cost models: Perspectives, comparison, and practice

Computer software has gradually become an indispensable element in many aspects of our daily life and an important factor in numerous critical applications such as nuclear plants, medical monitoring control, real-time military and air traffic control. In this paper, we present recent studies in software eligibility engineering that include nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) software reliability models, NHPP models with environmental factors, and cost models. Several applications are presented to illustrate the models. More applications are needed to fully validate the descriptive and predictive software reliability models in a general industrial setting. Future research directions in software reliability are also discussed.