On the distribution of software faults in evolution of complex systems

ABSTRACT

Complex software systems and systems of systems have become essential in the modern human society, making their reliability one of the crucial problems in software engineering. As such systems are developed as a sequence of releases, it is important to understand the reliability behavior during their evolution. There are many empirical principles regarding the distribution of faults within system structure. All these principles are implied by the underlying probability distribution of faults. The aim of this paper is to find the probability distribution that best fits the empirical fault data from 21 versions of two evolutionary developed open source systems, and study how this distribution changes during system evolution.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Extra-functional properties

      • Software reliability

    • Software system structures