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For software developers as well as software product users, fault removal efficiency is crucial. Developers can estimate the amount of work required by evaluating the proportion of addressed faults. At the same time, the level of trust in utilizing the software product can be determined by customers, based on this information. The proposed software reliability growth model considers fault removal efficiency relevant to contemporary scenarios characterized by automated testing and debugging tools. A comparison between the proposed model and other existing models is conducted by utilizing two data sets from software testing. Additionally, the best release plans are created by considering warranty costs, risk costs, and error removal costs while still meeting reliability requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To build highly reliable software products, software testing is required. The software engineer has a problem determining whether to complete the testing process and when to release the software system to the market. As the focus on high software increases, project managers must consider the cost of testing, testing availability time, and release time strategy. This research article utilizes a phase type non-homogeneous Poisson process to investigate the cost analysis and operational availability of a software reliability model. The software failure inter-arrival time is considered to follow a phase type distribution. The phase type software reliability model is valuable in reducing the time and effort required to select the appropriate models for software reliability evaluation. An explicit expression for the expected, bi-criterion cost analysis and operational availability is derived using standard results of the renewal reward theorem. The optimal software release policy T* is obtained analytically. Numerical illustrations and sensitivity analysis have been presented to illustrate the cost and availability analysis's efficiency and demonstrate conformity with the study's observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determining "software release time" and "testing stop time" is a significant challenge in software projects, as both greatly affect the software cost and reliability. To overcome the drawbacks of past research, this study presents a novel robust optimization approach considering the interval estimation of input parameters for a software reliability growth model. It aims to detect the optimal "software release time" and "testing stop time" to minimize software development costs in an uncertain environment. Additionally, it considers the time value of money for calculating model costs by considering the interest rate and inflation. Generally, this research is the first attempt to use a robust approach for optimizing the software development cost considering the time value of money. The paper investigates the model efficiency in practical situations through a case study and analyzes the effect of the discounted rate and parameters uncertainty on the development cost using a software reliability growth model. The results confirm the prominent role of uncertain parameters and the discounted rate value on software development cost. They also indicate that the proposed mathematical model is more consistent with the actual situation and flexible than the past models with deterministic parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the testing process of the software system as a stochastic process is a primary approach to the software reliability modeling technique. Besides some popular distributions, the Poisson distribution has been considered the best based on its advantage when modeling the times at which arrivals enter a system. In the non-homogeneous Poisson process group of models, the S-shaped function is a value curve with many good results. This paper proposes a new imperfect debugging software reliability model based on (1) an Imperfect debugging assumption (the testing process could cause new faults); and (2) the Fault detection rate can be controlled more effectively by the appearance of a growth-rate-controller. The real data from industrial projects verify the application of this model based on good popular criteria values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the increasing reliance on technology in nearly every industry over the past three decades, it has become necessary to evaluate the performance of a software product prior to its formal release in the market. The properties of a software application, such as its complexity and lines of code, are subject to change over time as a result of factors namely the testing environment, allocation of resources, testing efficiency, and testing team's expertise. The assumption of constant Fault Detection Rate (FDR) may not accurately anticipate the  potential number of bugs correctly. Keeping all these considerations in mind, a framework is developed to incorporate change point in the development of a testing effort-based Software Reliability Growth Model (SRGM) that takes into account the effect of application characteristics under both perfect and imperfect debugging settings. In addition, these outcomes are compared to the model without a change point. The proposed model is validated on two real-life software fault datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the model without a change point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to software development, precise planning, proper documentation and proper process control, some errors are inevitable in the software environment. These software flaws can lead to quality deterioration, which can be the main reason behind system failure. As the whole world especially developing countries is dependent upon software systems, it is very important to focus on its reliability aspect. Nowadays sophisticated systems require concerted efforts for managing and reducing the shortcomings in software engineering. But, these efforts require more cost, more money and more time. Software error prediction is the most helpful step in the testing stage of the software development life cycle. It identifies components or parts of the code where an error may occur and requires broad testing, so the test resources can be efficiently used. Software error assessment reduces efforts of testing the software by helping the software testers locate the actual problem and classify different classes of errors in the system. Error estimators are majorly used in various organizations to evaluate the software to save time, improve the quality of software and testing and optimize resources to meet timelines. Machine learning provides support in fault projection by collecting the training data from various edge devices and thus helps in escalating the reliability of the software available on Kaggle. The multilayer perceptron shows better results in precision, recall, F1 score and accuracy as compared to decision tree and Gaussian Naive Bayes as it achieves an accuracy of 96.8%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apart from the widespread acceptance of the digital library as a major research response among university lecturers and students, little is known about the reliability of its RFID software (RFIDS), the challenges posed during software flaws, and the improvement strategies that can be used to maintain the RFID software reliability. The various NHPP software reliability growth models (SRGMs) to investigate the reliabilities of software products of this kind in real-world software development has not always been achieved because those studies were primarily concerned with modeling fault detection processes (FDP) and ignoring the fault correction processes (FCP). Here, we propose a reliability model of RFID software while keeping in mind the interdependence between fault quantities of the dual procedures of fault detection and fault correction. In evaluating the software reliability, fault introduction and testing coverage rates were eventually included to the parameters making our proposed model to be highly effective in estimating and forecasting the dependability of the software when compared with existing NHPP software reliability growth models (SRGMs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Software testing is a critical activity for ensuring the quality and reliability of software systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of different test suites, researchers have developed a variety of metrics. Problem. However, comparing these metrics is challenging due to the lack of a standardized evaluation framework including comprehensive factors. As a result, researchers often focus on single factors (e.g., size), which finally leads to different or even contradictory conclusions. After comparing dozens of pieces of work in detail, we have found two main problems most troubling to our community: (1) researchers tend to oversimplify the description of the ground truth they use, and (2) data involving real defects is not suitable for analysis using traditional statistical indicators. Objective. We aim at scrutinizing the whole process of comparing test suites for our community. Method. To hit this aim, we propose a framework ASSENT (evAluating teSt Suite EffectiveNess meTrics) to guide the follow-up research for evaluating a test suite effectiveness metric. ASSENT consists of three fundamental components: ground truth, benchmark test suites, and agreement indicator. Its functioning is as follows: first, users clarify the ground truth for determining the real order in effectiveness among test suites. Second, users generate a set of benchmark test suites and derive their ground truth order in effectiveness. Third, users use the metric to derive the order in effectiveness for the same test suites. Finally, users calculate the agreement indicator between the two orders derived by two metrics. Result. With ASSENT, we are able to compare the accuracy of different test suite effectiveness metrics. We apply ASSENT to evaluate representative test suite effectiveness metrics, including mutation score and code coverage metrics. Our results show that, based on the real faults, mutation score, and subsuming mutation score are the best metrics to quantify test suite effectiveness. Meanwhile, by using mutants instead of real faults, test effectiveness will be overestimated by more than 20% in values. Conclusion. We recommend that the standardized evaluation framework ASSENT should be used for evaluating and comparing test effectiveness metrics in the future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software is playing a growing role in many safety-critical applications, and software systems dependability is a major concern. Predicting faulty modules of software before the testing phase is one method for enhancing software reliability. The ability to predict and identify the faulty modules of software can lower software testing costs. Machine learning algorithms can be used to solve software fault prediction problem. Identifying the faulty modules of software with the maximum accuracy, precision, and performance are the main objectives of this study. A hybrid method combining the autoencoder and the K-means algorithm is utilized in this paper to develop a software fault predictor. The autoencoder algorithm, as a preprocessor, is used to select the effective attributes of the training dataset and consequently to reduce its size. Using an autoencoder with the K-means clustering method results in lower clustering error and time. Tests conducted on the standard NASA PROMIS data sets demonstrate that by removing the inefficient elements from the training data set, the proposed fault predictor has increased accuracy (96%) and precision (93%). The recall criteria provided by the proposed method is about 87%. Also, reducing the time necessary to create the software fault predictor is the other merit of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to construct an evaluation index system suitable for tourism management classroom teaching, this article evaluates the teaching effectiveness of teachers and improves the teaching quality of tourism management courses. This article is based on developmental evaluation theory, using Analytic Hierarchy Process, Project Response Theory, and CIPP model to construct an indicator system suitable for tourism management classroom teaching. Then, based on the collected data of 5763 students, the reliability and effectiveness of the tool and indicator system were first verified. Then, the variable of teacher teaching style was introduced to construct an OLS regression model for empirical research. The research will summarize teacher and student data collected through the platform and conduct reliability analysis in SPSS 22.0 software, using Cronbach α The credibility of coefficient testing and evaluation tools. Cronbach in Environmental Fundamentals α The cβoefficient value is 0.8350. Cronbach for resource allocation α The coefficient is 0.735, and the Cronbah of the implementation process α Cronb Bach with a coefficient of 0.7 47 for teaching performance α The coefficient is 0.7240, indicating that rat ings has high reliability. Research has found that among the four specific types, the holistic type has the greatest impact on the specific situation, the holistic type has the greatest impact on the environmental foundation and resource allocation, and the legislative type has the greatest impact on the implementation process and teaching performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficiency and performance of a software application largely depend on the testing strategy adopted by the firm. Apart from the tools, techniques, and skills used for testing, the duration also plays an important influence in establishing software reliability. This defines the operational performance of the software. The testing duration decision is dependent on the failure behavior depicted by the software during the process of testing and the cost spent at various phases of development. In this paper, we study the multi-release model whose fault removal process is affected by random irregular fluctuations (white noise) and error generation phenomenon and determine the optimal time of testing for a multi-release-based software. The fault removal process is governed by the phenomenon of testing coverage which is affected by random fluctuations. The model shows encouraging results as it handles the stochastic property of the fault detection process. The optimal testing time is determined with the goal to minimize the expected development cost related to software while achieving the desired reliability levels of software for that release using a Genetic Algorithm. A real-life four-release fault dataset of tandem computers has been used to numerically demonstrate the methodology. It is observed through sensitivity analysis that the presence of white noise directly affects the cost and optimal testing duration. The potential to improve sensitivity, flexibility, early detection, discovering unsuspected patterns, and boost fault diagnosis is enhanced by collecting irregular fluctuations in the fault detection rate. This technology, by going beyond existing methodologies, has distinct advantages for detecting faults and can contribute to more dependable and efficient systems in a variety of domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical aspect of software engineering is Software fault prediction which aims to identify and prevent errors in software systems before their release which can cause failures or issues for its users. Various techniques and tools have been developed to detect software faults, including static code analysis, dynamic testing, and machine learning-based approaches. In past few years, the world has seen a growing interest in the use of ML models for predicting software faults, as they can effectively analyse high dimensional datasets and detect complex patterns which are difficult for human experts to detect. However, developing accurate and reliable software fault detection models requires careful selection of data, feature engineering, and model evaluation. This purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of potential applications and future research directions in the field of software fault detection. The study emphasizes the importance of identifying and addressing software faults to ensure the reliability and efficiency of software systems. Additionally, the paper outlines various approaches and techniques that can be employed for effective software fault detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, software development models have undergone changes. In order to meet user needs and functional changes, open-source software continuously improves its software quality through successive releases. Due to the iterative development process of open-source software, open-source software testing also requires continuous learning to understand the changes in the software. Therefore, the fault detection process of open-source software involves a learning process. Additionally, the complexity and uncertainty of the open-source software development process also lead to stochastically introduced faults when troubleshooting in the open-source software debugging process. Considering the phenomenon of learning factors and the random introduction of faults during the testing process of open-source software, this paper proposes a reliability modeling method for open-source software that considers learning factors and the random introduction of faults. Least square estimation and maximal likelihood estimation are used to determine the model parameters. Four fault data sets from Apache open-source software projects are used to compare the model performances. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model is superior to other models. The proposed model can accurately predict the number of remaining faults in the open-source software and be used for actual open-source software reliability evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the significant features of software quality is software reliability. In the testing phase, faults are identified and corrected by integrating them into software development, thus obtaining better reliability. Here, by utilizing the Elliptical Distributions-centric Emperor Penguins Colony Algorithm (ED-EPCA)-based Test Case Prioritization (TCP), an effectual Fault Detection (FD) technique is proposed using Fishers Yates Shuffled Shepherd Optimization Algorithm (FY-SSOA)-based Test Case Selection (TCS). Initially, for the incoming source code, the Test Case (TC) is created. Then, the significant factors needed for TCS and prioritization are identified. Next, by utilizing the Log Scaling-centered Generalized Discriminant Analysis (LS-GDA) model, the estimated factors are abated further to enhance the TCS along with prioritization for the Fault Detection Process (FDP). Then, using the FY-SSOA, the optimized TCs are selected. Subsequently, with the help of ED-EPCA, the TCs being selected are ranked as well as prioritized. Finally, to validate the proposed system's effectiveness, the model's performance is evaluated in the working platform of Java and analogized with the traditional methodologies. The results indicate that the test case prioritization-based fault detection method is robust with a 99.23% fault detection rate and a small amount of memory usage, which is only 8245475 kb by generating a large number of test cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essential attribute of software quality is software reliability. To achieve higher reliability, the testing phase with detected and corrected flaws is incorporated in the software development. The fault correction process (FCP) includes the fault detection process (FDP) to develop the software reliability growth model (SRGM). This is difficult to integrate because due to several reasons, including the effects of staffing levels and the interdependence of faults. It limits the applicability of the analytical model. Because of the adoption of data-driven methodologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, no precise FCP and FDP assumptions are necessary. In this article, we proposed a hybrid long short-term memory (LSTM) with BrainStorm Optimization and Late Acceptance Hill Climbing (BSO-LAHC) algorithm of a stepwise prediction model for software fault detection and correction. The fault detection and correction procedure has great influence by considering the testing effort. While compared to the existing methods, the proposed hybrid with the BSO-LAHC algorithm demonstrated superior results by using Firefox and bug tracking system Bugzilla datasets. The proposed model's effectiveness is confirmed via empirical study. Based on the Bugzilla and firefox datasets, the proposed mean square error performance is 1.92 and 21.44 respectively. Additionally, the proposed method is less expensive and takes less time to execute. In Bugzilla version 5.0.4, releases 2 and 3 had a determination coefficient of 99.2% and 98.9%, respectively. The FCP is 27% more effective than previous approaches, and the FDP is 32% more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two progressive aspects of the modeling problems in business process management (BPM), (1) in order to address the increasing complexity of user requirements on workflows underlying various BPM application scenarios, a more verifiable fundamental modeling method must be invented; (2) to address the diversification of software testing processes, more formalized advanced modeling technology must also be applied based on the fundamental modeling method. Aiming to address these modeling problems, this paper first proposes an ADCV (acquisition, decomposition, combination, and verification) method that runs through the core management links of four types of business processes (mining, decomposition, recombination, and verification) and then describes the compositional structure of the ADCV method and the design of corresponding algorithms. Then, the software testing workflow is managed and monitored using the method, and the corresponding analysis tool is implemented based on Petri nets. At the same time, the tool is applied to the case processing of the software testing workflow. Specifically, the workflow models are established successively through ADCV during the process of business iteration. Then, the analysis tool developed with the ADCV method, the model–view–controller (MVC) design pattern, and Java Swing technology are applied to instances of the software testing workflow to realize the modeling and management of the testing processes. Thus, the analysis tool can guarantee the accuracy of the parameter estimations of related software reliability growth models (SRGMs) and ultimately improve the quality of software products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging technologies in artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced optimization methodologies have opened up a new frontier in the field of software engineering. Among these methodologies, optimization algorithms such as the multi-verse optimizer (MVO) provide a compelling and structured technique for identifying software vulnerabilities, thereby enhancing software robustness and reliability. This research investigates the feasibility and efficacy of applying an augmented version of this technique, known as the test path distance multiverse optimization (TPDMVO) algorithm, for comprehensive path coverage testing, which is an indispensable aspect of software validation. The algorithm's versatility and robustness are examined through its application to a wide range of case studies with varying degrees of complexity. These case studies include rudimentary functions like maximum and middle value extraction, as well as more sophisticated data structures such as binary search trees and AVL trees. A notable innovation in this research is the introduction of a customized fitness function, carefully designed to guide TPDMVO towards traversing all possible execution paths in a program, thereby ensuring comprehensive coverage. To further enhance the comprehensiveness of the test, a metric called 'test path distance' (TPD) is utilized. This metric is designed to guide TPDMVO towards paths that have not been explored before. The findings confirm the superior performance of the TPDMVO algorithm, which achieves complete path coverage in all test scenarios. This demonstrates its robustness and adaptability in handling different program complexities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software defect prediction is a popular method for optimizing software testing and improving software quality and reliability. However, software defect datasets usually have quality problems, such as class imbalance and data noise. Oversampling by generating the minority class samples is one of the most well-known methods to improving the quality of datasets; however, it often introduces overfitting noise to datasets. To better improve the quality of these datasets, this paper proposes a method called US-PONR, which uses undersampling to remove duplicate samples from version iterations and then uses oversampling through propensity score matching to reduce class imbalance and noise samples in datasets. The effectiveness of this method was validated in a software prediction experiment that involved 24 versions of software data in 11 projects from PROMISE in noisy environments that varied from 0% to 30% noise level. The experiments showed a significant improvement in the quality of datasets pre-processed by US-PONR in noisy imbalanced datasets, especially the noisiest ones, compared with 12 other advanced dataset processing methods. The experiments also demonstrated that the US-PONR method can effectively identify the label noise samples and remove them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software reliability growth models (SRGMs) are used to estimate future failure rates and the number of residual defects in software. SRGM helps reliability software engineers make test termination decisions. Although more than 250 traditional SRGMs have been proposed for reliability assessment, research to develop more reliable models is still ongoing. Recently, new methods based on neural networks have been developed to improve the accuracy of software reliability assessment. The article develops a neural network algorithm for assessing software reliability. To do this, factors affecting software reliability and covering its life cycle were assessed. Based on them, sets for training a three-layer neural network were created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software reliability is one of the standard critical inherent characteristics of software systems. The testing coverage function (TCF) is a significant parameter for identifying the completeness and effectiveness of software testing. It is defined as the proportion of the code that has been tested up to time t. To capture the dynamic behavior of the number of faults detected over a period of time, several distributions, namely S‐shaped, inflection S‐shaped, logistic, log‐logistic, Weibull, Rayleigh, Erlang, and logarithmic exponentiated, have been used as TCF in literature. However, these distributions are not sufficient to describe TCF's practical behavior due to complexity and vagueness in the collected data. This study proposes two software reliability growth models (SRGMs), which incorporate the generalized inflection S‐shaped (GISS) distribution as TCF. The models have been developed in perfect and imperfect debugging environments while considering fault removal efficiency, error generation, and uncertainty in the operating environment. To analyze the effectiveness, the proposed models are then tested with six failure data sets. The choice of GISS distribution as a TCF improves the software reliability estimation in comparison with the existing models in the literature. Finally, single and multiple parameters sensitivity analysis also has been done and based on it, the critical parameters have been detected. The proposed models may be helpful for the system analyst to predict various parameters about some software systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of computers has been increasingly prevalent in our social lives in recent years. As a result, software engineers must create trustworthy software systems. Companies often release improved versions of the core program due to the constant demand and growing competition in the software field. A variety of growth models have been created to track and measure reliability by software managers and engineers. In the testing phase, the fault content and size of the software system increase, and consequently, the fault content found and eliminated during each debugging process decreases in comparison to the fault content present at the initial stage. In this scenario, we can consider the software fault detection process to be stochastic. The fault detection process is expressed in terms of testing coverage with random effects. In this study, we construct a testing coverage-based software model incorporating random effect with change point. We have used different testing coverage functions such as Exponential and Delayed S-shaped to study the effect of randomness. Further, multi-release planning for the proposed model has been studied and validated on the real-time failure dataset from Tandem Computers with four releases. Different performance measures and goodness-of-fit have been presented using a graphical representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assure the reliability and quality of the final product, testing is an essential and crucial part in the software development cycle. During this process, fault correction/detection activities are carried out to increase the reliability of the software. The nonhomogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) is the basis of the investigated software reliability growth models (SRGMs), which are based on the supposition that the number of faults found is affected by the amount of code covered during testing and that the amount of code covered during testing depends on the testing effort expended. This research takes into consideration several testing coverage functions: exponential, delayed S-shaped and logistic distributions, to propose three SRGMs that are based on testing efforts. For testing effort expenditure Weibull distribution has been employed. Two real failure datasets have been utilised to validate the proposed models, and their performance is evaluated using four goodness-of-fit metrics, including predictive ratio risk (PRR), coefficient of determination (R2), predictive power (PP) and mean square error (MSE). Sensitivity analysis of cost requirement-based release time of software for exponential function has been done by using a genetic algorithm, which minimized the overall cost of the software subject to the requirement for reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effort‐Aware Defect Prediction (EADP) methods sort software modules based on the defect density and guide the testing team to inspect the modules with high defect density first. Previous studies indicated that some feature selection methods could improve the performance of Classification‐Based Defect Prediction (CBDP) models, and the Correlation‐based feature subset selection method with the Best First strategy (CorBF) performed the best. However, the practical benefits of feature selection methods on EADP performance are still unknown, and blindly employing the best‐performing CorBF method in CBDP to pre‐process the defect datasets may not improve the performance of EADP models but possibly result in performance degradation. To assess the impact of the feature selection techniques on EADP, a total of 24 feature selection methods with 10 classifiers embedded in a state‐of‐the‐art EADP model (CBS+) on the 41 PROMISE defect datasets were examined. We employ six evaluation metrics to assess the performance of EADP models comprehensively. The results show that (1) The impact of the feature selection methods varies in classifiers and datasets. (2) The four wrapper‐based feature subset selection methods with forwards search, that is, AdaBoost with Forwards Search, Deep Forest with Forwards Search, Random Forest with Forwards Search, and XGBoost with Forwards Search (XGBF) are better than other methods across the studied classifiers and the used datasets. And XGBF with XGBoost as the embedded classifier in CBS+ performs the best on the datasets. (3) The best‐performing CorBF method in CBDP does not perform well on the EADP task. (4) The selected features vary with different feature selection methods and different datasets, and the features noc (number of children), ic (inheritance coupling), cbo (coupling between object classes), and cbm (coupling between methods) are frequently selected by the four wrapper‐based feature subset selection methods with forwards search. (5) Using AdaBoost, deep forest, random forest, and XGBoost as the base classifiers embedded in CBS+ can achieve the best performance. In summary, we recommend the software testing team should employ XGBF with XGBoost as the embedded classifier in CBS+ to enhance the EADP performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Industry is evolving at a very fast pace since last two decades. Many software developments, testing and test case generation approaches have evolved in last two decades to deliver quality products and services. Testing plays a vital role to ensure the quality and reliability of software products. In this paper authors attempted to conduct a systematic study of testing tools and techniques. Six most popular e-resources called IEEE, Springer, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Elsevier, Wiley and Google Scholar to download 738 manuscripts out of which 125 were selected to conduct the study. Out of 125 manuscripts selected, a good number approx. 79% are from reputed journals and around 21% are from good conference of repute. Testing tools discussed in this paper have broadly been divided into five different categories: open source, academic and research, commercial, academic and open source, and commercial & open source. The paper also discusses several benchmarked datasets viz. Evosuite 10, SF100 Corpus, Defects4J repository, Neo4j, JSON, Mocha JS, and Node JS to name a few. Aim of this paper is to make the researchers aware of the various test case generation tools and techniques introduced in the last 11 years with their salient features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enter the production stage, in DevOps practices candidate software releases have to pass quality gates, where they are assessed to meet established target values for key indicators of interest. We believe software reliability should be an important such indicator, as it greatly contributes to the end‐user satisfaction. We propose DevOpRET, an approach for reliability testing as part of the acceptance testing stage in DevOps. DevOpRET relies on operational‐profile–based testing, a common reliability assessment technique. DevOpRET leverages usage and failure data monitored in operations to continuously refine its estimate. We evaluate accuracy and efficiency of DevOpRET through controlled experiments with a real‐world open source platform and with a microservice architectures benchmark. The results show that DevOpRET provides accurate and efficient estimates of the true reliability over subsequent DevOps cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, infinite-failure software reliability models (SRMs), such as Musa-Okumoto SRM (1984), have been demonstrated to be effective in quantitatively characterizing software testing processes and assessing software reliability. This paper primarily focuses on the infinite-failure (type-II) non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP)-based SRMs and evaluates the performances of these SRMs comprehensively by comparing with the existing finite-failure (type-I) NHPP-based SRMs. In more specific terms, to describe the software fault-detection time distribution, we postulate 11 representative probability distribution functions that can be categorized into the generalized exponential distribution family and the extreme-value distribution family. Then, we compare the goodness-of-fit and predictive performances with the associated 11 type-I and type-II NHPP-based SRMs. In numerical experiments, we analyze software fault-count data, collected from 16 actual development projects, which are commonly known in the software industry as fault-count time-domain data and fault-count time-interval data (group data). The maximum likelihood method is utilized to estimate the model parameters in both NHPP-based SRMs. In a comparison of the type-I with the type-II, it is shown that the type-II NHPP-based SRMs could exhibit better predictive performance than the existing type-I NHPP-based SRMs, especially in the early stage of software testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventionally, the reliability of a web portal is validated with generalized conventional methods, but they fail to provide the desired results. Therefore, we need to include other quality factors that affect reliability such as usability for improving the reliability in addition to the conventional reliability testing. Actually, the primary objectives of web portals are to provide interactive integration of multiple functions confirming diverse requirements in an efficient way. In this paper, we employ testing profiles to measure the reliability through software operational profile, input space profile and usability profile along with qualitative measures of reliability and usability. Moreover, the case study used for verification is based on a web application that facilitates information and knowledge sharing among its online members.The proposed scheme is compared with the conventional reliability improvement method in terms of failure detection and reliability. The final results unveil that the computation of reliability by using the traditional method (utilizing failure points with the assistance of Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) becomes ineffective under certain situations. Under such situations, the proposed scheme helps to compute the reliability in an effective way. Moreover, the outcomes of the study provide insight recommendations about the testing and measurement of reliability for Web based software or applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Concurrent programming is increasingly present in modern applications. Although it provides higher performance and better use of available resources, the mechanisms of interaction between processes/threads result in a greater challenge for software testing activity. The nondeterminism present in those applications is one of the main issues during the test activity since the same test input can produce different possible execution paths, which may or not contain defects. The test data automatic generation can alleviate this problem, ensuring higher speed and reliability in software testing activity. This paper explores the automatic test data generation for concurrent programs through Genetic Algorithm, a bioinspired optimization technique, and proposes a test data generation approach for concurrent programs, called BioConcST, and a new operator for the selection of test subjects, called FuzzyST, which uses fuzzy logic. The approaches were evaluated in an experimental study towards their validation. The results showed that BioConcST is more promising than the other approaches at all analyzed levels. FuzzyST, together with Elitism and Tournament operators, provided the best results; however, it proved more suitable for concurrent programs of higher complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing and debugging is a crucial part of the software development process since defective software not only incurs customer dissatisfaction but also might incur legal issues. However, the managers of a software development company cannot arbitrarily prolong their software debugging period due to their software testing budget and opportunity in the market. Accordingly, in order to propose an advantageous testing project, the managers should be aware of the influence of the testing project on cost, quality, and time to make the best decision. In this study, a new software reliability growth model (SRGM) with consideration of the testing staff's learning effect is proposed to achieve better prediction. The methods of estimating the model's parameters and the symmetric confidence intervals are also proposed in the study. Moreover, in the past, most of the SRGMs focused on a single software system. However, in practice, some software systems were developed using modular-based system engineering approaches. Therefore, traditional software testing work can be changed to multiple modular testing work in this scenario. Therefore, the manager can use this to dispatch multiple staff groups to perform the individual testing work simultaneously. The study proposes two mathematical programming models to handle the scheduling of modular testing work. Additionally, the design of a computerized decision support system is also proposed in the study for the application in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software reliability refers to the ability of a system to perform its intended function under specified conditions for a specified period of time. The first critical step in the software reliability testing process is to create a Software Operational Profile (SOP). Several methodologies for creating SOP have been proposed. Nonetheless, nearly all the proposed studies have neglected the uniqueness of the new software paradigms, despite the fact that these are generally distinguished by their own concepts and methodologies. One of these software paradigms is multi-agent systems. Rather than using a generic one, it would be more useful to propose a specific methodology for creating SOP. In this paper, we propose a methodology for developing Operational Profile for specific kinds of multi-agent systems (so-called normative multi-agent systems). A detailed case study is used to demonstrate this methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regression testing is essential for continuous integration and continuous development. It is needed to ensure that the modifications have not produced any errors or faults, thereby maintaining the quality and reliability of the software. The testers usually avoid exhaustive retesting because it requires lots of effort and time. The test case prioritization and minimization solve the issue by scheduling the critical test cases and removing redundant ones. Optimization techniques help by improving the efficiency of these techniques while utilizing limited resources. This paper proposed an enhanced discrete novel bat algorithm for the test case prioritization. The algorithm is modified in two ways. First, we have proposed a fix-up mechanism for the discrete combinatorial problem, which conducts the perturbation in the population using the asexual reproduction algorithm. Second, the novel bat algorithm is improved, where the bats hunt in different habitats with quantum behavior using Gaussian distribution and search in the limited habitat with Doppler effect. In addition, we have embedded the test case minimization procedure in the algorithm for redundancy reduction. The experimental results are empirically analyzed using different testing criteria, i.e., fault and statement coverage on three subject programs from the software infrastructure repository. Consequently, test selection percentage, coverage loss, fault detection loss, and cost reduction percentages are deduced for the test case minimization at program and version levels. Empirical results and statistical comparisons with the random search, bat algorithm, novel bat algorithm, birds swarm algorithm, whale optimization algorithm, and genetic algorithm show the outperformance of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testing of software is an essential aspect of software development to determine the testing release time. remaining number of faults and software reliability. Testing process includes selection of testing team, estimation of testing effort. and execution of software. Study reveals that maximum cost of software development is utilized in testing of software. Therefore, estimation of testing effort during testing of software is needed to determine. The uncertainty involved in estimated parameters and reliability is necessary to address, which can be done in fuzzy paradigm. Due to complexity of software systems, it is very tough to remove all faults and results into imperfect debugging. Sometimes. the new faults may generate in testing a software. this process is called error generation. In this study, we proposed a software reliability growth model using testing effort function in the presence of error generation and imperfect debugging under fuzzy paradigm. The proposed model segregated the process into two phases considering fault observation and fault removal. Moreover. software release time is discussed with the consideration of uncertainty in reliability. Finally. results are validated numerically on real data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding faults in software modules is an emerging issue in software reliability systems, and the assessment of the fault is performed by software fault prediction systems (SFPS). The identification process of fault-prone software modules is one of the prioritized aspects before initiating the testing process of the same modules. The SFPS helps improve software quality within the specified time and cost values. Early fault prediction in SFPS for the different software components showed significant results concerning the cost and time parameters. According to the state-ofthe-art SFPS, ensemble-based classifiers were performed best and most cost-effective compared to other classifier methods. Recently, a random ensemble forest with adaptive synthetic sampling (E-RF-ADASYN) has been developed, is tested on a sample of PROMISE datasets, and shown the cost-effective classifier results. In the logistic regression to software quality models, and the other knowledge of account for prior probability and costs of misclassification. Probabilities and costs of misclassification in a logistic regression-based classification algorithm for software quality modeling. The decision tree algorithm is an ensemble learning approach for prediction. The algorithm works based on developing several decision trees and later decides the output class based on the most popular one. The proposed work focuses on developing an alternative sampling method called ensemble-random forest with multi-distinguishedfeatures sampling (E-RF-MDFS), for obtaining the best sample illustration for representing the entire dataset. Batinduced butterfly optimization (BBO) has been used for the feature extraction process. The experiments are conducted on 8 datasets of the PROMISE database. The proposed E-RF-MDFS has improved performance than E-RF-ADASYN in fault detection accuracy, real positive rate, and Pearson's correlation coefficient. On comparing the performance of E-RF-based classifiers, the performance of the proposed MDFS is the best, with an FDA of 99.3 % (Xalan v2.6) than the ADASYN classifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) have been developed over last five decades to estimate the failure rate, software reliability and remaining number of faults in the software during testing phase of software development life cycle. There are numerous SRGMs available in the research literature and in the presence of numerous SRGM, appropriate selection is a staggering task for the software testing professionals. In the software reliability area, researchers have always been interested to select the optimal SRGM to use in a particular situation. In this study, we have developed an integrated technique based on Criteria Importance Through Inter Criteria Correlation (CRITIC) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to select the optimal SRGM. The weights of criteria are obtained by the CRITIC method and SRGMs are ranked by order using TOPSIS method. The working of proposed integrated CRITIC‐TOPSIS approach is illustrated on the two real‐time failure data sets. Furthermore, the methodology validation idea supports the current study by comparing the results obtained with the previous multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) methodologies namely Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS). The study revealed that the ranking of SRGMs can be solved effectively using the integration of CRITIC and TOPSIS. The result of this study plays a significant role to take decisions and to evaluate the feasibility of SRGM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, software testing is considered as a proficient technique to achieve improvement in quality and reliability of the software. But, the quality of test cases has a considerable influence on fault revealing capability of software testing activity. Test Case Prioritization (TCP) remains a challenging issue since prioritizing test cases is unsatisfactory in terms of Average Percentage of Faults Detected (APFD) and time spent upon execution results. TCP is mainly intended to design a collection of test cases that can accomplish early optimization using preferred characteristics. The studies conducted earlier focused on prioritizing the available test cases in accelerating fault detection rate during software testing. In this aspect, the current study designs a Modified Harris Hawks Optimization based TCP (MHHO-TCP) technique for software testing. The aim of the proposed MHHO-TCP technique is to maximize APFD and minimize the overall execution time. In addition, MHHO algorithm is designed to boost the exploration and exploitation abilities of conventional HHO algorithm. In order to validate the enhanced efficiency of MHHO-TCP technique, a wide range of simulations was conducted on different benchmark programs and the results were examined under several aspects. The experimental outcomes highlight the improved efficiency of MHHO-TCP technique over recent approaches under different measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the software development life cycle, the quality and reliability of software are critical to software developers. Poor quality and reliability not only cause the loss of customers and sales but also increase the operational risk due to unreliable codes. Therefore, software developers should try their best to reduce such potential software defects by undertaking a software testing project. However, to pursue perfect and faultless software is unrealistic since the budget, time, and testing resources are limited, and the software developers need to reach a compromise that balances software reliability and the testing cost. Using the model presented in this study, software developers can devise multiple alternatives for a software testing project, and each alternative has its distinct allocation of human resources. The best alternative can therefore be selected. Furthermore, the allocation incorporates debuggers' learning and negligent factors, both of which influence the efficiency of software testing in practice. Accordingly, the study considers both human factors and the nature of errors during the debugging process to develop a software reliability growth model to estimate the related costs and the reliability indicator. Additionally, the issue of error classification is also extended by considering the impacts of errors on the system, and the expected time required to remove simple or complex errors can be estimated based on different truncated exponential distributions. Finally, numerical examples are presented and sensitivity analyses are performed to provide managerial insights and useful directions to inform software release strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, an imperfect debugging software reliability growth model (SRGM) with Bayesian analysis was proposed to determine an optimal software release in order to minimize software testing costs and also enhance the practicability. Generally, it is not easy to estimate the model parameters by applying MLE (maximum likelihood estimation) or LSE (least squares estimation) with insufficient historical data. Therefore, in the situation of insufficient data, the proposed Bayesian method can adopt domain experts' prior judgments and utilize few software testing data to forecast the reliability and the cost to proceed with the prior analysis and the posterior analysis. Moreover, the debugging efficiency involves testing staff's learning and negligent factors, and therefore, the human factors and the nature of debugging process are taken into consideration in developing the fundamental model. Based on this, the estimation of the model's parameters would be more intuitive and can be easily evaluated by domain experts, which is the major advantage for extending the related applications in practice. Finally, numerical examples and sensitivity analyses are performed to provide managerial insights and useful directions for software release strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault-counting data are collected in the testing process of software development. However, the data are not used for evaluating the efficiency of fault correction activities because the information on the fault detection and correction times of each fault are not recorded in the fault-counting data. Furthermore, it is difficult to collect new data on the detection time of each fault to realize efficiency evaluation for fault correction activities from the collected fault-counting data due to the cost of personnel and data collection. In this paper, we apply the thinning method, using intensity functions of the delayed S-shaped and inflection S-shaped software reliability growth models (SRGMs) to generate sample data of the fault detection time from the fault-counting data. Additionally, we perform simulations based on the infinite server queuing model, using the generated sample data of the fault detection time to visualize the efficiency of fault correction activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An optimal software release strategy is a well-investigated issue in software reliability literature. Comprehensive testing is expected before releasing the software into the market to enhance the reliability and security of the software device. In recent years, few analysts have recommended the scheme for software projects that support releasing the software early in the market and continue the testing process for an added period in the field environment even after the software is distributed. These studies are based on one common assumption that the efficiency of the software engineers in detecting the faults occurs at a consistent rate throughout the testing phase. However, bug-identification rate may experience discontinuity at the software release time. In software engineering, the time-point at which fault detection rate changes is termed as change-point. Consequently, an alternative software release policy is proposed in the present paper, which offers a generalized framework for fault detection phenomenon using the unified approach. An extensive analysis of software time-to-market and testing duration based on cost-efficiency and reliability measures is discussed by considering the change in tester's fault detection rate. A multi-criteria decision making technique known as multi-attribute utility theory is applied to optimize the software release policy under field-testing (FT) and no field-testing (NFT) frameworks. The relevance of the optimization problem is illustrated using a numerical example, comprising both the exponential and S-shaped bug-detection process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open source software (OSS) has become one of the modern software development methods. OSS is mainly developed by developers, volunteers, and users all over the world, but its reliability has been widely questioned. When OSS faults are detected, volunteers or users send them to developers by email or network. After the developer confirms the fault, it will be randomly assigned to the debugger who may be a developer, a volunteer, or a user. These open source community contributors also have the phenomenon of learning when removing faults. When the detected faults are removed, the number of introduced faults decreases gradually. Therefore, this study proposes a software reliability model with the decreasing trend of fault introduction in the process of OSS development and testing. The validity of the proposed model and the accuracy of estimating residual faults are verified by experiments. The proposed model can be used to evaluate the reliability and predict the remaining faults in the actual OSS development and testing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To satisfy the needs of the individualized manufacturing of products, the smart manufacturing system (SMS) is frequently reconfigured. To quickly verify the reliability and adaptability of industrial software in reconfiguring the SMS for new or upgraded product orders, a semi-physical simulation method for testing and evaluation of industrial software is proposed based on digital-twins-driven technology. By establishing a semi-physical simulation model of SMS, the reliability and robustness of the software system are quickly verified by running industrial software in various manufacturing scenarios. In this paper, the key technologies to carry out semi-physical simulation testing and evaluation of industrial software for SMSs are expounded in detail, including how to synchronize cyber and physical systems, how to conduct semi-physical accelerated simulation testing, and how to identify defects quickly in industrial software used in actual production environments. By establishing a semi-physical simulation production line model for stepper motors, the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach are verified, and the testing verification time of industrial software is significantly reduced. Finally, the robustness of the industrial software for SMS is further verified by conducting fault injection testing, so as to provide implications for fault prognostics or fault-prevention research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software defect prediction has become a significant study path in the field of software engineering in order to increase software reliability. Program defect predictions are being used to assist developers in identifying potential problems and optimizing testing resources to enhance program dependability. As a consequence of this strategy, the number of software defects may be predicted, and software testing resources are focused on the software modules with the most problems, allowing the defects to be addressed as soon as feasible. The author proposes a research method of defect prediction technology in software engineering based on convolutional neural network. Most of the existing defect prediction methods are based on the number of lines of code, module dependencies, stack reference depth, and other artificially extracted software features for defect prediction. Such methods do not take into account the underlying semantic features in software source code, which may lead to unsatisfactory prediction results. The author uses a convolutional neural network to mine the semantic features implicit in the source code and use it in the task of software defect prediction. Empirical studies were conducted on 5 software projects on the PROMISE dataset and using the six evaluation indicators of Recall, F1, MCC, pf, gm, and AUC to verify and analyze the experimental results showing that the AUC values of the items varied from 0.65 to 0.86. Obviously, software defect prediction experimental results obtained using convolutional neural networks are still ideal. Defect prediction model in software engineering based on convolutional neural network has high prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal specifications can provide a solid foundation for software development and support for techniques of software quality assurance, such as specification-based inspection and testing. To ensure that these techniques can be applied effectively in practice, efficiently and accurately understanding specifications becomes extremely important. While this may be relatively easy for well-trained developers in formal methods, it can be rather difficult for computer since computer does not easily understand specifications. This difficulty poses a challenge for realizing automatic specification-based verification techniques that are in high demand for reducing development cost and improving software reliability. In this paper, we address this problem by discussing how the formal specification can be transformed into a knowledge graph to provide comprehensible, well-organized details of the specification for developers and computers. The transformation is done by extracting and storing information about attributes of each component and by establishing relationships between components in a formal specification. We elaborate on a top-down approach of constructing a knowledge graph from a specification, including creating an ontology, designing the Entity–Relationship (ER) diagram of the relational database based on the created ontology, extracting and storing attribute and relationship information in the relational database, mapping ontology to its instances and relational data to RDF triples, and displaying knowledge graph. Further, we present a case study to show how our approach works on the formal specification of an ATM system. Finally, we describe three experiments to evaluate its performance in improving specification readability, effectively guiding inspectors to establish traceability links between specifications and programs, and detecting defects through program inspection, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mutation testing is basically a fault-based software testing technique, which has been proposed to measure the fault detection effectiveness of a test suite using programs with simulated faults (namely mutants). However, mutation testing is time consuming and computationally expensive because of the normal use of a large amount of mutants. Thus, reducing the mutants is of great significance. To address this problem, various mutant reduction techniques have been proposed. Among them, the identification of redundant mutants aims at removing mutants whose test results can be inferred by other mutants. This article proposes a redundant mutant identification technique based on selective symbolic execution called ReMuSSE for weak mutation testing. Redundant mutants could be revealed by identifying those with similar program execution state changes within a program block involving mutated statements. An empirical study was conducted using 13 C programs from different application domains with varying sizes. The empirical results showed that ReMuSSE could identify up to 31.4% redundant mutants and consequentially save up to 35.2% time cost of weak mutation testing. The results demonstrated that ReMuSSE could effectively identify redundant mutants and thus could significantly improve the efficiency of weak mutation testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of software testing usually involves the correction of a detected bug immediately upon detection. In this article, in contrast, we discuss continuous time testing of a software with periodic debugging in which bugs are corrected, instead of at the instants of their detection, at some pre-specified time points. Under the assumption of renewal distribution for the time between successive occurrence of a bug, maximum-likelihood estimation of the initial number of bugs in the software is considered, when the renewal distribution belongs to any general parametric family or is arbitrary. The asymptotic properties of the estimated model parameters are also discussed. Finally, we investigate the finite sample properties of the estimators, specially that of the number of initial number of bugs, through simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's technical world, growing interest of the users is evident on the software systems, which eventually have dragged the attention of many academicians and practitioners. Over the last few years, several researches have been done in order to develop a highly reliable software system. This proposed study provides a valuable add on to the literature of software reliability growth model and related software release time problem. Paper discusses the software reliability growth models that incorporate testing coverage and Fault Reduction Factor simultaneously. Models are developed using non homogeneous Poisson Process and can be used to estimate the reliability of software system quantitatively. Further, we have determined the optimal time to release software into the market by minimizing the development cost subject to the reliability requirement. Paper finally takes into consideration sensitivity analysis in optimal release time problem taking into account the impact of variations in the cost parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing is undertaken to ensure that the software meets the expected requirements. The intention is to find bugs, errors, or defects in the developed software so that they can be fixed before deployment. Testing of the software is needed even after it is deployed. Regression testing is an inevitable part of software development, and must be accomplished in the maintenance phase of software development to ensure software reliability. The existing literature presents a large amount of relevant knowledge about the types of techniques and approaches used in regression test case selection and prioritization (TCS&P), comparisons of techniques used in TCS&P, and the data used. Numerous secondary studies (surveys or reviews) have been conducted in the area of TCS&P. This study aimed to provide a comprehensive examination of the analysis of the enhancements in TCS&P using a thorough systematic literature review (SLR) of the existing secondary studies. This SLR provides: (1) a collection of all the valuable secondary studies (and their qualitative analysis); (2) a thorough analysis of the publications and the trends of the secondary studies; (3) a classification of the various approaches used in the secondary studies; (4) insight into the specializations and range of years covered in the secondary texts; (5) a comprehensive list of statistical tests and tools used in the area; (6) insight into the quality of the secondary studies based on the seven selected Research Paper Quality parameters; (7) the common problems and challenges encountered by researchers; (8) common gaps and limitations of the studies; and (9) the probable prospects for research in the field of TCS&P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software reliability literature consists of various change-point-based software reliability growth models and related release time problems. The primary assumption of the existing models is the existence of change-point before software release time only. This does not look practical as the testing team becomes more proficient in detecting the faults due to their continuous involvement in software development by the software release time. Hence the fault detection rate in the pre- and post release phase is not the same. To capture this change in fault detection rate in the pre- and post release testing phase, we propose a new software reliability modeling framework by considering two change-points during the software lifecycle; that is, there exists a change-point before release time and release time as a change-point. Further, in the last one-decade software firms have changed their strategy of stop testing the software after release and continue to test even after release to remove the number of faults to provide better user experiences. This phenomenon attracted academicians to develop theoretical as well empirical study on post release testing and formulation of related release time problem. In this paper, we propose a software cost model to determine optimal release and testing stop time considering under the assumption of two change-points as mentioned above. The proposed model is validated on real-life data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, software effort prediction (SEP) and software test prediction (STP) (i.e., software reliability problems) are tackled by integrating the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) with a backpropagation neural network (BPNN). Software effort and test prediction problems are common in software engineering and arise when seeking to determine the actual software resources needed to develop a project. BPNN is the most popular prediction algorithm used in the literature. The performance of BPNN depends totally on the initial parameter values such as weight and biases. The main objective of this paper is to integrate SSA with the BPNN to find the optimal weight for every training cycle and thereby improve prediction accuracy. The proposed method, abbreviated as SSA-BPNN, is tested on twelve SEP datasets and two STP datasets. All datasets vary in terms of complexity and size. The results obtained by SSA-BPNN are evaluated according to twelve performance measures: MSE, RMSE, RAE, RRSE, MAE, MRE, MMRE, MdMRE, VAF(%), R2(%), ED, and MD. First, the results obtained by BPNN with SSA (i.e., SSA-BPNN) and without SSA are compared. The evaluation of the results indicates that SSA-BPNN performs better than BPNN for all datasets. In the comparative evaluation, the results of SSA-BPNN are compared against thirteen state-of-the-art methods using the same SEP and STP problem datasets. The evaluation of the results reveals that the proposed method outperforms the comparative methods for almost all datasets, both SEP and STP, in the case of most performance measures. In conclusion, integrating SSA with BPNN is a very powerful approach for solving software reliability problems that can be used widely to yield accurate prediction results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An effective software fault prediction (SFP) model could help developers in the quick and prompt detection of faults and thus help enhance the overall reliability and quality of the software project. Variations in the prediction performance of learning techniques for different software systems make it difficult to select a suitable learning technique for fault prediction modeling. The evaluation of previously presented SFP approaches has shown that single machine learning-based models failed to provide the best accuracy in any context, highlighting the need to use multiple techniques to build the SFP model. To solve this problem, we present and discuss a software fault prediction approach based on selecting the most appropriate learning techniques from a set of competitive and accurate learning techniques for building a fault prediction model. In work, we apply the discussed SFP approach for the five Eclipse project datasets and nine Object-oriented (OO) project datasets and report the findings of the experimental study. We have used different performance measures, i.e., AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, to assess the discussed approach's performance. Further, we have performed a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the economic viability of the approach. Results showed that the presented approach predicted the software's faults effectively for the used accuracy, AUC, sensitivity, and specificity measures with the highest achieved values of 0.816, 0.835, 0.98, and 0.903 for AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, respectively. The cost-benefit analysis of the approach showed that it could help reduce the overall software testing cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]