Reliability of Conformance Tests

Published

August 21, 1998

Author(s)

Robert C. Hagwood, Raghu N. Kacker, James H. Yen, D L. Banks, Lynne S. Rosenthal, Leonard J. Gallagher, Paul E. Black

Abstract

A conformance test is a software assurance test that is applied in order to determine if specification requirements of the software are being met. It is a time-dependent model, where the software object is subjected to an a priori known test suite. The reliability of the software is the proability that it will function properly for the values in the input space. Because the input space is usually very large, it is impossible to sample all input values, so in order to provide better sampling coverage, the input space is partitioned into homogeneous subspaces. Samples are drawn from each subspace for testing the software. The conformance tests based on these samples are required to pass all tests in the test suite. Based on these data, the classical statistical estimate of reliability is one. Such an estimate may be unrealistic if the sample sizes are not large. Even in such a scenario a nontrivial confidence interval is provided for the reliability.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the COMPSAC 98 Software Conference

Conference Dates

August 21-24, 1998

Conference Location

Vienna, AU

Conference Title

COMPSAC

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

binomial, conformance, reliability, software, tests

Citation

Hagwood, R. , Kacker, R. , Yen, J. , Banks, D. , Rosenthal, L. , Gallagher, L. and Black, P. (1998), Reliability of Conformance Tests, Proceedings of the COMPSAC 98 Software Conference, Vienna, AU (Accessed May 13, 2025)