The Estimation of Parameters of the Hypergeometric Distribution and Its Application to the Software Reliability Growth Model.

The hypergeometric distribution model has been proposed for estimating the number of faults initially resident in a program at the beginning of test/debugging process. However, the parameter values of the hypergeometric distribution necessary for making the estimation were previously determined by the three-dimensional exhaustive search and therefore much time was needed to get the numerical result. In this paper, six ways to estimate parameters of the hypergeometric distribution are investigated and their accuracies are examined comparatively. It is demonstrated that the least-squares sum method is the best one among those we tried and can be well applied to real test/debug data for estimating the number of faults still resident in a program after test/debugging. By this method the estimation time can be reduced greatly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]