A unified scheme for developing software reliability growth models using stochastic differential equations

Of late some continuous‐state space software reliability growth model (SRGM) based on stochastic differential equations (SDEs) of Itô type (SDE‐SRGM) has been proposed to assess software reliability. However, these SDE‐SRGM does not differentiate between failure observation/detection and fault removal/correction processes. In this paper, we first develop a unified scheme for SDE‐SRGM for the case when there is no differentiation between failure observation/detection and fault removal/correction processes, and then extend it for the case when there is a clear differentiation between failure observation/detection and fault removal/correction processes. The unified scheme presented in this paper is described by the failure observation/detection and fault removal/correction distributions. The unification scheme eases the task of model selection. The proposed models under the unification scheme have been validated using real data sets. Various comparison criteria results have been presented.