Modelling Open-Source Software Reliability Incorporating Swarm Intelligence-Based Techniques

Open-source software is gaining popularity in industrial projects due to its accessibility and cost-effectiveness. However, concerns persist about its quality and reliability. To assess software reliability quantitatively, software reliability models are utilized, with the unknown parameters of these models typically determined using statistical techniques. In many cases, these methods fail to converge to the global optimal solution of parameter estimation of nonlinear mathematical models and are quite sensitive to the initial guesses of unknown parameters. This necessitates employing a high-quality parameter estimation technique. The study demonstrates the potential application of nine nature-inspired swarm intelligence-based algorithms to address nonlinear parameter estimation problems and effectively identify the global optimal solution with high likelihood, irrespective of the initial guess. These typical algorithms are classified into several categories, including animal-inspired algorithms such as grey wolf optimizer, insect-inspired algorithms such as artificial bee colony, social spider optimization, firefly algorithm, and moth flame optimization, bird-inspired algorithms such as particle swarm optimization, sea creature-inspired algorithms such as whale optimization algorithm, and plant-inspired algorithms such as flower pollination algorithm and dandelion optimizer. Three real-world, open-source reliability datasets are utilized to assess the efficacy of these algorithms in estimating the parameters of two prominent non-homogeneous Poisson process models in software reliability.

Software has become a vital factor in the fourth industrial revolution. Owing to the increase in demand for software products in various fields (big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, etc.), the software industry has expanded more than ever before. Therefore, software reliability has become very important, and efforts are being made to increase it. One of these efforts is the development of software reliability models (SRMs). SRMs have been studied for a long time as a model that predicts software reliability by using the number of software faults. Software failures can occur for several reasons, including independent software faults such as code errors and software hangs, as well as dependent cases where code errors lead to other software faults. Recently, due to the diversity of software operating environments, software faults are more likely to occur in a dependent manner, and, for this reason, they are likely to increase rapidly from the beginning and progress slowly to the maximum number thereafter. In addition, many large companies have focused on open-source software (OSS) development, and OSS is being developed by many users. In this study, we propose a new SRM that considers the number of finite faults and dependent faults, and examine the goodness-of-fit of a new SRM and other existing non-homogeneous Poisson process models based on the OSS datasets. Through numerical examples, the proposed model demonstrated a significantly better goodness-of-fit when compared to other existing models, and it also exhibited better results on the newly proposed integrated criteria.

With the increasing use of Open Source Software (OSS) in high speed networking, parallel processing and distributed computing, OSS has emerged as mainstream in the last decade and is now being broadly accepted even by the traditional proprietary software development companies. The major advantages of OSS over traditional software development are less development cost, availability of source code, quality and security. Software reliability—an important attribute of software quality, is defined as the probability that a software will operate free of failures or breakdown for a specified time under specified conditions (IEEE Std. 1633-2016). Investigation of Software reliability with the help of software reliability models (SRM) undertakes the estimation and prediction of the failure phenomenon of a software. In this paper we have investigated whether Non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) based software reliability models fit in the big data open source software fault/bug data. We have extracted real and latest bug/fault data of Hadoop and Spark–open source big data applications, from bug tracking/management tool Jira. For this purpose, we have also compared these models on different goodness-of-fit and prediction criteria based on collected failure data to ascertain whether a best fitted model can also be a best predictor. It is found that the best model fitting the failure data is not a best predictor model.

In recent years, software development models have undergone changes. In order to meet user needs and functional changes, open-source software continuously improves its software quality through successive releases. Due to the iterative development process of open-source software, open-source software testing also requires continuous learning to understand the changes in the software. Therefore, the fault detection process of open-source software involves a learning process. Additionally, the complexity and uncertainty of the open-source software development process also lead to stochastically introduced faults when troubleshooting in the open-source software debugging process. Considering the phenomenon of learning factors and the random introduction of faults during the testing process of open-source software, this paper proposes a reliability modeling method for open-source software that considers learning factors and the random introduction of faults. Least square estimation and maximal likelihood estimation are used to determine the model parameters. Four fault data sets from Apache open-source software projects are used to compare the model performances. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model is superior to other models. The proposed model can accurately predict the number of remaining faults in the open-source software and be used for actual open-source software reliability evaluation.

In this paper, we propose an artificial neural- network-based approach for software reliability estimation and modeling. We first explain the network networks from the mathematical viewpoints of software reliability modeling. That is, we will show how to apply neural network to predict software reliability by designing different elements of neural networks. Furthermore, we will use the neural network approach to build a dynamic weighted combinational model. The applicability of proposed model is demonstrated through four real software failure data sets. From experimental results, we can see that the proposed model significantly outperforms the traditional software reliability models.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the reliability growth of Open Source Software (OSS) versus software developed in-house (i.e. Closed Source Software, CSS) using Software Reliability Growth Model. This study uses 22 datasets containing failure data of CSS and 18 datasets containing defect data of OSS projects. The failure data are modelled by eight SRGM (Musa Okumoto, Inflection S-Shaped, Goel Okumoto, Delayed S-Shaped, Logistic, Gompertz, Yamada Exponential, and Generalized Goel Model). These models are chosen due to their widespread use. The results can be summarized as follows All selected SRGM fit to defect data of the OSS projects in the same manner as that of CSS. OSS reliability grows similarly to that of CSS. Musa Okumoto and Inflection S-Shaped perform well for CSS, while for OSS Inflection S-Shaped and Gompertz are good performers. SRGM can be used for reliability characterization of OSS projects.

One of the established trends of research areas and practices in software engineering that dealt with the measurement and enhancement of reliability is software reliability engineering. Stochastic software reliability models find typical usage for analysis. These are the models that perform modeling on failure process of the software and exploit other software metrics or failure data as cornerstone for parameter estimation. The ability of the models for estimating and predicting the current reliability and future failure behavior, respectively, is high. Due to any failures and faults in the system, a product becomes unreliable. The lack of understanding of nature of the software makes the measurement of software reliability as a challenging task. It is not possible to determine a best way to measure the reliability and other aspects of software. This paper proposes an efficient software reliability growth model (SRGM) in which logistic exponential TEF is exploited. This model offers increased failure rate recognition and suitable ways to resolve faults and so on. Our work estimates the SRGM parameters using optimization algorithm. Such estimation can aid in developing precise software reliability model. In order to accomplish the optimization, we use artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. As the parameters optimization considerably improves the quality of parameters to be used for reliability growth model, reliability growth can also be improved considerably.

Software development based on the Open Source Software (OSS) model is being increasingly accepted to stand up servers and applications. In particular, Cloud OSS is now attracting attention as the next generation of software products due to cost efficiencies and quick delivery. This chapter focuses on the software reliability modeling and assessment for Cloud computing infrastructure software, especially open source software, such as OpenStack and Eucalyptus. In this chapter, the authors introduce a new approach to the Jump diffusion process based on stochastic differential equations in order to consider the interesting aspect of the numbers of components and users in the reliability model. In addition, the authors consider the network traffic of the Cloud in the reliability modeling and integrate the reliability model with a threshold-based neural network approach that estimates network traffic. Actual software fault-count data are analyzed in order to show numerical examples of software reliability assessment. This chapter also illustrates how the proposed method of reliability analysis can assist in quality improvement in Cloud computing software.

The software reliability is mainly obtained through modeling and estimating. The existing software reliability models are nonlinear, and the parameter estimation of these models is difficult. At the same time, there are many optimization methods for solving the nonlinear function problems, such as artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). ABC has the characteristics of fewer control parameters, strong exploration ability, and the high accuracy of the solution. The PSO algorithm has the characteristics of the relatively small amount of computation and fast search speed but it has premature convergence, especially in dealing with complex multi-peak search problems, and the problem of poor local search ability. This paper proposes the parameter estimation method of software reliability model based on hybrid PSO-ABC, constructs a new fitness function based on maximum likelihood estimation, removes the wrong solution during the algorithm execution process, and adds knowledge to improve the solution accuracy. This paper uses five classic sets of software failure data to estimate the GO model parameters and make predictions and performs a variety of comparisons of the algorithm results. The experimental results show that the new fitness function is better, the solution of parameter estimation using the hybrid PSO-ABC is more accurate, and the hybrid PSO-ABC has a great advantage in generality and especially in limited data.

Management technologies for improving software reliability are very important for software TQM (Total Quality Management). The quality characteristics of software reliability is that computer systems can continue to operate regularly without the occurrence of failures on software systems. In this chapter, we describe several recent developments in software reliability modeling and its applications as quantitative techniques for software quality/reliability measurement and assessment. That is, a quality engineering analysis of human factors affecting software reliability during the design-review phase, which is the upper stream of software development, and software reliability growth models based on stochastic differential equations and discrete calculus during the testing phase, which is the lower one, are discussed. And, we discuss quality-oriented software management analysis by applying the multivariate analysis method and the existing software reliability growth models to actual process monitoring data. Finally, we investigate an operational performability evaluation model for the software-based system, introducing the concept of systemability which is defined as the reliability characteristic subject to the uncertainty of the field environment.KeywordsHuman factor analysisDesign-review experimentOSS reliabilityStochastic differential equationDiscrete modelingDifference equationSoftware managementSoftware project assessmentSoftware performability modelingSystemability assessment

Cost and time effective solution for software reliability analysis is becoming the biggest concern for open source software development. The open source software development process is a bug driven development and its life cycle cost is mainly incurred in bug correction process. Bug reports, with its various features, play an important role in improving the quality of software products. Unfortunately, less attention is paid towards extraction of important attributes from bug logs. This paper is focused on the comment feature of bug repositories to extract bug judgment and correction times for the open source software reliability model building. A bug report life cycle model is presented and the method to compute the two time points is proposed. The study used datasets from ten official releases of Apache 2.0 to draw empirical results. The proposition is expected to assist in open source software reliability model building.

Over time, software has become increasingly important in various fields. If the current software is more dependent than in the past and is broken owing to large and small issues, such as coding and system errors, it is expected to cause significant damage to the entire industry. To address this problem, the field of software reliability is crucial. In the past, efforts in software reliability were made to develop models by assuming a nonhomogeneous Poisson-process model (NHPP); however, as models became more complex, there were many special cases in which models fit well. Hence, this study proposes a software reliability model using deep learning that relies on data rather than mathematical and statistical assumptions. A software reliability model based on recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent units (GRU), which are the most basic deep and recurrent neural networks, was constructed. The dataset was divided into two, Datasets 1 and 2, which both used 80% and 90% of the entire data, respectively. Using 11 criteria, the estimated and learned results based on these datasets proved that the software reliability model using deep learning has excellent capabilities. The software reliability model using GRU showed the most satisfactory results.

Software is widely used in various fields. There is no place where it is not used from the smallest part to the entire part. In particular, the tendency to rely on software is accelerating as the fields of artificial intelligence and big data become more widespread. Therefore, it is extremely important to evaluate the reliability of software because of the extensive damage that could occur if the software fails. Previously, software reliability models were developed based on mathematical and statistical grounds; however, immediate response was difficult. Therefore, in this study, a software reliability model was developed that depends on data using deep learning, and it was analyzed by replacing the activation function previously used in deep learning with the proposed software reliability model. Since the sigmoid function has a similar shape to the software reliability model, we utilized this to propose a deep learning software reliability model that replaces the activation function, the sigmoid function, with the software reliability function. Two datasets were compared and analyzed using 10 criteria, and the superiority of the proposed deep-learning software reliability model was proved. In addition, the results were compared by changing the parameters utilized in the proposed deep-learning software reliability model by −10%, −5%, 5%, and 10%, and it was found that the larger the parameters, the smaller the change.

Non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) model with typical reliability growth patterns is an important technology about evaluating software reliability. Two parameters which affect software reliability are original failures number and failure-detected rate. The paper firstly defines the software failure distributed and discusses a few kinds' software reliability models. Non-homogeneous Poisson process model is presented. The models with different parameters are discussed and analyzed. The model's restrict condition and some of parameters, original failures number and failure-detected ratio, are extrapolated. Assessment methodology about key parameters is given.

Open source software (OSS) has become one of the modern software development methods. OSS is mainly developed by developers, volunteers, and users all over the world, but its reliability has been widely questioned. When OSS faults are detected, volunteers or users send them to developers by email or network. After the developer confirms the fault, it will be randomly assigned to the debugger who may be a developer, a volunteer, or a user. These open source community contributors also have the phenomenon of learning when removing faults. When the detected faults are removed, the number of introduced faults decreases gradually. Therefore, this study proposes a software reliability model with the decreasing trend of fault introduction in the process of OSS development and testing. The validity of the proposed model and the accuracy of estimating residual faults are verified by experiments. The proposed model can be used to evaluate the reliability and predict the remaining faults in the actual OSS development and testing process.