Current trends of the software reliability in Japan and needs of future related activities

Recently, software development is following hardware development in terms of features such as downsizing and short time-to-market. In the past, software development took place slowly in a centralized computer environment. On the other hand, recent software has the potential to be released in a rather short development time, because of the availability of distributed development environments and workstations. In this kind of short lifecycle, software reliability should be a central quality concern but not be overwhelmed. The trade-off among different factors of qualities becomes even more important than in the traditional big size development style. We have to evaluate the acquired quality in quantitative way, and in order to do this we need a suitable measure. To have such a measure, we need to have appropriate data we can analyze. As a result, we must have precise data