Software Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability Engineering System (SOFT-RAMES)

The Software Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability Engineering System (SOFT-RAMES) has been developed for the Air Force Material Command Space Systems Support Group as a software reliability and maintainability engineering tool to aid in the management and implementation of a post deployment support process for mission computer software. Using failure, change, and source code data, it provides Pareto analyses, R&M trends and predictions, and checklists to identify problems and impacts of software changes. Initial results, and lessons learned are described, along with the capabilities of SOFT-RAMES. Important initial lessons learned are the need to calibrate metrics models to the application, a quantitative means to set metrics based design guidelines, and the usefulness of failure rate trends to investigate the effects of the underlying software change process on software reliability. SOFT-RAMES is implemented for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite operations centers mission software