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One of the main goals of an organization developing software is to increase the quality of the software while at the same time to decrease the costs and the duration of the development process. To achieve this, various decisions e.ecting this goal before and during the development process have to be made by the managers. One appropriate tool for decision support are simulation models of the software life cycle, which also help to understand the dynamics of the software development process. Building up a simulation model requires a mathematical description of the interactions between di.erent objects involved in the development process. Based on experimental data, techniques from the .eld of knowledge discovery can be used to quantify these interactions and to generate new process knowledge based on the analysis of the determined relationships. In this paper blocked neuronal networks and related relevance measures will be presented as an appropriate tool for quanti.cation and validation of qualitatively known dependencies in the software development process.
With the ever-increasing significance of software in our everyday lives, it is vital to afford reliable software quality estimates. Typically, quantitative software quality analyses rely on either statistical fault prediction methods (FPMs) or stochastic software reliability growth models (SRGMs). Adopting solely FPMs or SRGMs, though, may result in biased predictions that do not account for uncertainty in the distinct prediction methods; thus rendering the prediction less reliable. This paper identifies flaws of the individual prediction methods and suggests a hybrid prediction approach that combines FPMs and SRGMs. We adopt FPMs for initially estimating the expected number of failures for fi- nite failure SRGMs. Initial parameter estimates yield more accurate reliability predictions until sufficient failures are observed that enable stable parameter estimates in SRGMs. Being at the equilibrium level of FPM and SRGM pre- dictions we suggest combining the competing prediction methods with respect to the principle of heterogeneous redundancy. That is, we propose using the in- dividual methods separately and combining their predictions. In this paper we suggest Bayesian model averaging (BMA) for combining the different methods. The hybrid approach allows early reliability estimates and encourages higher confidence in software quality predictions.