Design of safety-critical software reliability demonstration test based on Bayesian theory

The original software reliability demonstration test (SRDT) takes no consideration of prior knowledge and priori distribution adequately, which costs a lot of time and resource. A new improved Bayesian based SRDT method was proposed. First, a framework for SRDT scheme was constructed. According to the framework the decreasing function was employed to construct the priori distribution density functions for discrete and continuous safety-critical software respectively, and then discrete Bayesian software demonstration function (DBSDF) scheme and continuous Bayesian software demonstration function (CBSDF) scheme were presented. A set of comparative experiments have been carried out with the classic demonstration testing scheme on several published data sets. The experimental results reveal that both DBSDF scheme and CBSDF scheme are more efficient and applicable especially for the safety-critical software with high reliability requirements.