Controlled sequential bifurcation for software reliability study

Computer simulation is an appealing approach for the reliability analysis of structure-based software systems as it can accommodate important complexities present in realistic systems. When the system is complicated, a screening experiment to quickly identify important factors (components) can significantly improve the efficiency of analysis. The challenge is to guarantee the correctness of the screening results with stochastic simulation responses. Control Sequential Bifurcation (CSB) is a new screening methods for simulation experiments. With appropriate hypothesis testing procedures, CSB can simultaneously control the Type I error and power. The past research, however, has focused on responses with normal distributions. This paper proposes a CSB procedure with binary responses for software reliability analysis. A conditional sequential test for equality of two proportions is implemented to guarantee the the desired error control.