Comparative Study of Open Source Software Reliability Assessment Tools

Software reliability assessment has become an important means to evaluate software failure behaviors and ensure the software reliability. With the continuous development of automation technology, considerably number of reliability assessment tools have been developed for software reliability analysis, estimation and prediction. In this paper, most popular software reliability assessment tools are reviewed. Five of them, SFRAT, SRATS, RSRAT, PHSRM and SMERFS, are selected for comprehensively comparative analysis. We also construct the evaluation index system of software reliability assessment tools, and analyze the differences in software reliability estimation and prediction ability of these tools through experimental studies. In the end, we summarize the characteristics and potential application scenarios of each tool, and further discuss the development trends and future research directions.

I. Introduction

With the development of software technology, the scale and complexity of software have increased accordingly. How to ensure the quality of software has become an urgent problem to be solved, especially in some key application areas, such as aviation and aerospace. If the error in the software cannot be effectively eliminated at the first time, it may lead to catastrophic consequence in real operation, such as the great economy loss or even human injuries and casualties.