Reliability over consecutive releases of a semiconductor Optical Endpoint Detection software system developed in a small company

Demonstrating software reliability across multiple software releases has become essential in making informed decisions of upgrading software releases without impacting significantly end users' characterized processes and software quality standards. Standard defect and workload data normally collected in a typical small software development organization can be used for this purpose. Most of these organizations are normally under aggressive schedules with limited resources and data availability that are significantly different from large commercial software organizations where software reliability engineering has been successfully applied. Trend test, input domain reliability models (IDRM), and software reliability growth models (SRGM) were used in this paper on a semiconductor Optical Endpoint Detection (OED) software system to examine its overall trend and stability, to assess the system's operational reliability, and to track its reliability growth over multiple releases. These techniques also provided evidence that continuous defect fixes increased software reliability substantially over time for this software system.