A framework for reliability assessment of software components

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the reliability assessment of software components that incorporates test case execution and output evaluation. Determining an operational profile and test output evaluation are two difficult and important problems that must be addressed in such a framework. Determining an operational profile is difficult, because it requires anticipating the future use of the component. An expected result is needed for each test case to evaluate the test result and a test oracle is used to generate these expected results. The framework combines statistical testing and test oracles implemented as self-checking versions of the implementations. The framework is illustrated using two examples that were chosen to identify the issues that must be addressed to provide tool support for the framework.