Chapter List

1. Introduction

A key objective of modern software engineering is targeted towards identifying and removing existing defects in a piece of software while preventing the injection of new ones. This is done during the testing phase of the development process where the aim is to ensure that the software reaches the required quality standard before it is released into the market place. In order to be able to effectively manage software defects, it is important that the production team be able to monitor the performance of the software. One very effective way of achieving this is to produce a stochastic model to predict when failures are likely to occur, fit it using empirical data and then use the estimated model to calculate important metrics such as rate of occurrence of failures, mean time to failure and to predict how much defects remain...