Assessing software designs using capture-recapture methods

The number of faults not discovered by the design review can be estimated by using capture-recapture methods. Since these methods were developed for wildlife population estimation, the assumptions used to derive them do not match design review applications. The authors report on a Monte Carlo simulation to study the effects of broken assumptions on maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) and jackknife estimators (JEs) of faults remaining. It is found that the MLE performs satisfactorily if faults are classified into a small number of homogeneous groups. Without grouping, the MLE can perform poorly, but it generally does better than the JE