Optimal and adaptive testing for software reliability assessment

Optimal software testing is concerned with how to test software such that the underlying testing goal is achieved in an optimal manner. Our previous work shows that the optimal testing problem for software reliability growth can be treated as closed-loop or feedback control problem, where the software under test serves as a controlled object and the software testing strategy serves as the corresponding controller. More specifically, the software under test is modeled as controlled Markov chains (CMCs) and the control theory of Markov chains is used to synthesize the required optimal testing strategy. In this paper, we show that software reliability assessment can be treated as a feedback control problem and the CMC approach is also applicable to dealing with the optimal testing problem for software reliability assessment. In this problem, the code of the software under test is frozen and the software testing process is optimized in the sense that the variance of the software reliability estimator is minimized. An adaptive software testing strategy is proposed that uses the testing data collected on-line to estimate the required parameters and selects next test cases. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive software testing strategy can really work in the sense that the resulting variance of the software reliability estimate is much smaller than that resulting from the random testing strategies. The work presented in this paper is a contribution to the new area of software cybernetics that explores the interplay between software and control.