Statistical Certification of Software Systems

Common software release procedures based on statistical techniques try to optimise the trade-off between further testing costs and costs due to remaining errors. We propose new software release procedures where the aim is to certify that the software does not contain errors. The underlying model is a new discrete-time model similar to the JelinskiMoranda model. The decisions are based on a mix of classical and Bayesian approaches to sequential testing and do not require any assumption on the initial number of errors. keywords. Software release, error-free software, software testing, Bayesian statistics, stopping time, sequential testing, martingale, optional stopping.