Software reliability growth models with normal failure time distributions

This paper proposes software reliability growth models (SRGM) where the software failure time follows a normal distribution. The proposed model is mathematically tractable and has sufficient ability of fitting to the software failure data. In particular, we consider the parameter estimation algorithm for the SRGM with normal distribution. The developed algorithm is based on an EM (expectation‐maximization) algorithm and is quite simple for implementation as software application. Numerical experiment is devoted to investigating the fitting ability of the SRGMs with normal distribution through 16 types of failure time data collected in real software projects.