A heuristic approach for software reliability prediction: the equally-weighted linear combination model

A heuristic approach is given to addressing the software reliability modeling problem. The heuristic approach is based on a linear combination of three popular software reliability models. A simple, predetermined combination is suggested by assigning equal weights to each component model for the final delivery of the software reliability prediction. In a preliminary examination, this equally-weighted linear combination (ELC) model is judged to perform well when applied to three published software failure data sets. The authors further present five other sets of software failure data taken from major projects at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and apply the ELC model as well as six other popular models for a detailed comparison and evaluation. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed ELC Model not only performs better than all the other models by a wide margin, but also enjoys favorable properties that practitioners would like to see in their software reliability modeling practices. These properties include: simplicity, low-risk, ease of application, and insensitivity to data noise