Mutation testing framework for software reliability model analysis and reliability estimation

After several years of research, even today estimation of software reliability is extremely challenging. The non-deterministic nature of the factors that contribute to the reliability estimation has led to the development of numerous statistical models for this purpose. One of the important factors that contribute to software reliability is testing and the aim of this paper is to present an approach on how mutation testing could be used to find “the true” reliability of a system. For this purpose it provides a framework to create a software failure dataset, which could be used to find the uncertainty bounds associated with testing and for measurement of different factors that influence uncertainty in reliability estimation, such as test coverage, time between failures and code coverage. The approach is experimented with an open source search tool.