A good software reliability engineering (SRE) program, introduced early in the development cycle, will mitigate problems by preparing program management in advance for the testing effort and allowing them to plan both schedule and budget to cover the required testing.
Problems are also avoided through continuous reviews of requirements throughout the life cycle, particularly for handling of exception conditions. If requirements are incomplete there will be no testing of the exception conditions.
Also, it’s advantageous to provide the most efficient test plan targeted to bringing the product to market in the shortest time subject to the reliability requirements imposed by the customer or market expectations.
Reliability in software reliability engineering, refers to the ability to operate failure-free. More specifically, it is defined as the probability of a product to operate free of failures for a specified period of time under specified operating conditions. Reliability is a quality attribute that is highly valued by customers and users of products and services.
Organizations, engineers and consumers need a consistent definition of reliability between software, hardware and systems. This is so they may be combined to determine the reliability of a product or service as a whole delivered to a user.
However, there are differences between hardware and software that affect how we analyze their respective reliabilities. Software reliability engineering (SRE) assesses how well software-based products and services meet users’ operational needs. SRE uses quantitative methods based on reliability measures to do this assessment.
The primary goal of SRE is to maximize customer satisfaction. SRE uses such quantitative methods as statistical estimation and prediction, measurement and modeling.
As the reliability of a product or service is highly dependent on operating conditions and the reliability of software is related to how the software is used, the quantitative characterization of the use of software is an integral part in SRE.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers Software Reliability Engineering Training, a 3-day course that is intended to provide attendees with critical knowledge and skills applied to software reliability and software reliability engineering on real world projects. This course focuses on proactive principles and methods to predict software reliability before the coding is started.
Software Reliability Engineering Training teaches you how to design and develop reliable software, reliability verification and testing of the software systems.
Contact us for more information, questions, comments.