A Holistic Qualitative Approach to Software Reliability

This paper discusses the reliability driven approach towards developing software solutions and products. Requirements deficiencies were the cause of 99% of their field reliability problems. This has been expanded by Brendan Murphy to say that the problems on computer systems were mostly due to requirements deficiencies and interface weaknesses. This paper aims to provide a consolidated checklist, methods and tools that add to strength the existing requirement engineering process. It will facilitate to convert customer requirements into robust product specifications and it also proposes a way of how to deal with changing requirements. All these methods elaborate on identifying the risks and its mitigation through standard procedures. This paper also deals with Interface based Software Design approach where reusability of the already tested software module can be used for the new product or solution to reach high level reliability. The paper throws light on redundancy based architecture to achieve high reliability. It also describes some checklist for effective software coding. It also discusses the various testing methods that ensure to meet reliability objectives without compromising product features. These procedures defines a customer oriented and holistic approach, when adhered to, along with the usual activities of SDLC, will add considerable value to the requirement engineering domain and ensures that final product is engineered through proper design ,quality control measures and software testing procedures.