Category: reliability
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Good enough reliability models: still an unknown
Estimating the likelihood that a software system will operate as intended, for some period of time, is one of the big problems within the field of software reliability research. When software does not operate as intended, a fault, or bug, or hallucination is said to have occurred. Three events need to occur for a user […]
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Survival of CVEs in the Linux kernel
Software contained in safety related applications has to have a very low probability of failure. How is a failure rate for software calculated? The people who calculate these probabilities, or at least claim that some program has a suitably low probability, don’t publish the details or make their data publicly available. People have been talking […]
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1970s: the founding decade of software reliability research
Reliability research is a worthwhile investment for very large organizations that fund the development of many major mission-critical software systems, where reliability is essential. In the 1970s, the US Air Force’s Rome Air Development Center probably funded most of the evidence-based software research carried out in the previous century. In the 1980s, Rome fell, and […]
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The units of measurement for software reliability
How do the people define software reliability? One answer can be found by analyzing defect report logs: one study found that 42.6% of fault reports were requests for an enhancement, changes to documentation, or a refactoring request; a study of NASA spaceflight software found that 63% of reports in the defect tracking system were change […]