Determining the Minimal Software Reliability Test Effort by Stratified Sampling

Software reliability testing provided the necessary guarantee for improving software reliability level and estimation. The traditional method for generating software reliability test cases could be seen as a simple random sampling, which was randomly choosen according to the operational profile defined by Musa. The stratified sampling was well known as a complex but more accurate sampling approach which could make the sampling results more accurate and less variance by dividing the population into several subsets and randomly sampling from each subset respectively. First, this paper introduced the traditional approach to determine the number of test cases in the discrete software reliability demonstration testing. Second, the background of the stratified sampling and necessary condition for the minimal test effort based on the stratified sampling were put forward. Third, the new method’s principle and details were analyzed and a sample was given to show the method’s effectiveness. Finally, the future work was discussed.