Introduction to Software Reliability: A State-of-the-Art Review

Today's products and systems are becoming more and more software intensive. Often, the reliability of the software has been ignored in the development process, with analyses and other normal reliability tasks assuming that the software has a reliability of one (perfectly reliable). This has often been the case because of the hardware oriented background of practicing reliability personnel and their lack of understanding of software development. This publication acquaints reliability practitioners with the fundamentals of software development as they apply to system reliability, enabling consideration of "total system" reliability rather than just addressing hardware. Different software development processes are discussed along with models and differences between hardware and software reliability definitions and concepts.