Software Reliability Modeling with Integrated Test Coverage

The models to predicate software reliability using test coverage (TC) have been widely studied in recent years. An increasing number of TC based software reliability models (TC-SRMs) have been developed. Meanwhile, to quantify the degree of effectiveness of software testing comprehensively, over ten kinds of TC measures have been proposed and each of them has its strength and weakness. A common problem with current TC-SRMs is that only a few classic TC are presented respectively. How to use all various TC metrics simultaneously in TC-SRMs has not been well discussed. This paper proposes a novel concept, integrated test coverage (ITC), to combine multi kinds of TC metrics as an integrated parameter for test effectiveness and reliability estimation. Then, the paper reviews the available TC-SRMs and classifies them into five categories by the modeling methods. Based on the weakness analysis of each category TC-SRMs respectively, we suggest that ITC can be applied to enhance these reported TC-SRMs.