Experiences with Software Reliability Measurement: Introduction
26 January 1989
Software reliability is a customer-oriented quality measure. It characterizes how well a computer program functions in satisfying the customer's operational requirements. A common way of specifying reliability is in terms of failures per thousand hours of program execution.
Software reliability models characterize how software reliability varies with program execution time and other factors. They can therefore be used to predict average behavior of the program. Software reliability measurement has applications in system engineering, in the control of change of systems in the field, and in the evaluation of software engineering technologies.