Your third assignment will give you an opportunity to design a software reliability study. You will need to identify a software product that you very familiar with. You then need to devise a plan for measuring the reliability of the product. You will not need to carry out your plan for this assignment.

You will need to choose appropriate reliability metrics for some piece of software. You will need to justify your choice of metrics. You will then need to use your reliability metrics to write plausible reliability specifications for the software. Your specifications should take into account the fact that some defects or faults are more serious than others are. You should consider at least three classes of faults (those that corrupt data, those that render the software unavailable to users, and those that cause incorrect data to be transmitted).

You will need to describe how you would go about validating the reliability specifications you have written for the software product. You should include a description of any validation tools required in your assessment (e.g. testing workbenches, CASE tools, etc.). You will need to describe your data collection procedures and all statistical methods or calculations required.

This assignment is due in 3 weeks. Your assignment write-up should include a brief description of the project goals, brief overview of the software product, reliability metric descriptions, reliability specifications, data collection procedures, discussion of statistics and computations, and expected limitations of the study.

Assigned: 2/14/01

Date due: 3/12/01