An Effective Stopping Rule for Software Reliability Testing

The importance of the reliability of software is growing more and more as more complicated digital computer systems are used for real-time control applications. To provide more reliable software, the testing period should be long enough, but not unnecessarily too long. In this study, we suggest a simple but effective stopping rule which can provide just proper amount of testing time. We take unique features of software into consideration and adopt non-homogeneous Poisson process model and Bayesian approach. A numerical example is given to demonstrate the validity of our stopping rule.