A Parameter Estimation Method for Software Reliability Models

During the last 40 years, many software reliability growth models (SRGM) have been proposed for estimating the reliability of software. Most of them are nonlinear functions, which makes it hard to estimate the parameters. A parameter estimation method based on the Ant Colony Algorithm is proposed in this paper. Numerical examples based on three sets of real failure data are presented and discussed in detail. It is shown that (1) the traditional method can't get possible solutions for some models and datasets, while the proposed method always can get one; (2) comparing with PSO algorithm, our method's results have nearly a 10 times higher accuracy for most of the models. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [CEIS 2011]