Reliability and Portability Assessment Tool Based on Hazard Rates for an Embedded Open Source Software

An embedded OSS (Open Source Software) known as one of OSS has been gaining a lot of attention in the embedded system area, i.e., Android, BusyBox, TRON, etc. However, the poor handling of quality problem and customer support prohibit the progress of embedded OSS. Therefore, many companies have been hesitant to innovate the embedded OSS because of OSS includes several software versions. Also, it is difficult for developers to assess reliability and portability of the porting-phase in case of installing the embedded OSS on a single-board computer. In this paper, we develop a method of software reliability/portability assessment tool based on a hazard rate model for the embedded OSS. Especially, we analyze actual software failure-occurrence time-interval data to show numerical examples of software reliability/portability assessment for the embedded OSS. Moreover, we show that our model and tool can assist quality improvement for embedded OSS systems development.