Development of Fuzzy Software Operational Profile

Software operational profile (SOP) has found its extensive use in applications such as estimation of software reliability, allocation of testing resources, evaluation of software quality attribute and testing of software etc. However, due to limited data resources and large efforts required to collect the data in to point estimates, reluctance is observed towards the development of SOP in spite of its numerous benefits. This paper proposes a model for the development of fuzzy software operational profile (FSOP), which takes input data in the form of linguistic variables from experts and assigns occurrence possibilities to the input parameters. The proposed method has been applied to various software and results obtained are compared with existing practice. Besides simplicity, FSOP can be easily altered for changes in operational frequencies simply by changing the location and value of the affected linguistic variable.