Software Reliability: Tools and Algorithms

Reliability Society

Agenda:
5:30-6:00 Sign In, Networking, Light Dinner & Refreshments
6:00-6:10 Chapter Chair Greetings & Announcements
6:10-8:00 Dr. Lance N. Fiondella, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
8:00-8:15 Q&A session, meeting adjourns

Dr. Lance N. Fiondella

While there are many software reliability models, there are relatively few tools to automatically apply these models. Moreover, these tools are over two decades old and are difficult or impossible to configure on modern operating systems without a virtual machine. To overcome this technology gap, we are developing an open source software reliability tool for the software engineering community. A key challenge posed by such a project is the stability of the underlying model fitting algorithms, which must ensure that the parameter estimates of a model are indeed those that best fit the data. If such model fitting is not achieved users who lack knowledge of the underlying mathematics may inadvertently use inaccurate predictions. This is potentially dangerous if the model underestimates important measures such as the number of faults remaining or overestimates mean time to failure (MTTF). To improve the robustness of the model fitting process, we are developing expectation maximization (EM) and expectation conditional maximization (ECM) algorithms to compute the maximum likelihood estimates of nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) software reliability growth models (SRGM).

This talk will present an implicit ECM algorithm for the Weibull NHPP SRGM. The implicit approach eliminates computationally intensive integration from the update rules of the ECM, achieving a speedup of between 200 and 400 times that of explicit ECM methods. The enhanced performance and stability of these algorithms will ultimately benefit the software engineering communities that use the open source software reliability tool.

Biography:

Lance Fiondella is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He received his PhD (2012) in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Connecticut. He conducts research in the areas of system and software reliability engineering and has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers on these topics. He served as vice-chair of IEEE Standard 1633, IEEE Recommended Practice on Software Reliability from 2013-2015 and is an elected member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Reliability Society (2015-2017). His research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), and Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR).

Meeting Location: MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 3 Forbes Road, Lexington, MA 02421

Admission: No Admission Charge.