Comparing between Maximum Likelihood Estimator and Non-linear Regression Estimation Procedures for NHPP Software Reliability Growth Modelling

Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) have been used by engineers and managers for tracking and managing the reliability change of software to ensure required standard of quality is achieved before the software is released to the customer. SRGMs can be used during the project to help make testing resource allocation decisions and/ or it can be used after the testing phase to determine the latent faults prediction to assess the maturity of software artifact. A number of SRGMs have been proposed and to apply a given reliability model, defect inflow data is fitted to model equations. Two of the widely known and recommended techniques for parameter estimation are maximum likelihood and method of least squares. In this paper we compare between the two estimation procedures for their applicability in context of NHPP SRGMs. We also highlight a couple of practical considerations, reliability practitioners must be aware of when applying SRGMs.