A Review on Software Reliability

Software reliability signifies the probability that software in a pre-defined condition executes its tasks without malfunctioning for a specified duration. It may be regarded as a component of software quality. Unlike software quality, however, it concentrates on the functionality of the software and disregards such issues as ergonomics of software products, development economics, etc. unless they constitute functional attributes of the software product. To most project and software development managers, reliability is equated to correctness, that is, they look to testing and the number of “bugs” found and fixed. While finding and fixing bugs discovered in testing is necessary to assure reliability, a better way is to develop a robust, high quality product through all of the stages of the software lifecycle. That is, the reliability of the delivered code is related to the quality of all of the processes and products of software development; the requirements documentation, the code, test plans, and testing.