Experimenting Traditional and Modern Reliability Models in a 3-Years European Software Project

Reliability is a very important non-functional aspect for software systems and artefacts. In literature, several definitions of software reliability exist and several methods and approaches exist to measure reliability of a software project. However, in the literature no works focus on the applicability of these methods in all the development phases of real software projects.In this paper, we describe the methodology we adopted during the S-CASE FP7 European Project to predict reliability for both the S-CASE platform as well as for the software artefacts automatically generated by using the S-CASE platform. Two approaches have been adopted to compute reliability: the first one is the ROME Lab Model, a well adopted traditional approach in industry; the second one is an empirical approach defined by the authors in a previous work. An extensive dataset of results has been collected during all the phases of the project.The two approaches can complement each other, to support to prediction of reliability during all the development phases of a software system in order to facilitate the project management from a non-functional point-of-view.