A Reliability Model for Object-Oriented Software

Software reliability is one of the important attributions of dependable systems. A number of software reliability models have been developed by now, but few of them take object-oriented features into account. Nowadays, more and more software systems are developed in object-oriented technology and object-oriented programming languages contain new language features, most notably inheritance, polymorphism, and dynamic binding which have a strong impact on the reliability of software. In this paper, we propose an accurate model for object-oriented software reliability estimation. The central idea of the strategies proposed is to incorporate the influence factors of complexity of the software under test and the test effectiveness into the object-oriented software reliability model so as to make the software reliability model more adequate and accurate to the real situation for object-oriented software. Results from substantial experiments have shown the rationality and usefulness of the new model.