Software reliability modeling with weibull-type testing-effort and multiple change-points

Software reliability is defined as the probability of failure-free software operation for a specified period of time in a specified environment. Over the past 30 years, many software reliability growth models (SRGMs) have been proposed for estimation of reliability growth of products during software development processes. SRGMs proposed in the literature took into consideration the amount of testing-effort spent on software testing which can be depicted as a Weibull-type curve. However, in reality, the consumption rate of testing-effort expenditures may not be a constant and could be changed at some time points. Therefore, in this paper, we will incorporate the concept of multiple change-points into the Weibull-type testing-effort function. New model is proposed and the applicability of proposed model is demonstrated through real software failure data set. Our experimental results show that the proposed model has a fairly accurate prediction capability.