Modeling software reliability growth with genetic programming

Reliability models are very useful to estimate the probability of the software fail along the time. Several different models have been proposed to estimate the reliability growth, however, none of them has proven to perform well considering different project characteristics. In this work, we explore genetic programming (GP) as an alternative approach to derive these models. GP is a powerful machine learning technique based on the idea of genetic algorithms and has been acknowledged as a very suitable technique for regression problems. The main motivation to choose GP for this task is its capability of learning from historical data, discovering an equation with different variables and operators. In this paper, experiments were conducted to confirm this hypotheses and the results were compared with traditional and neural network models