Software SIG: Quantifying Software Reliability and Readiness  

Quantifying Software Reliability and Readiness

by: Jack Olivieri and Abbaya Asthana

Tuesday December 15, 2009

As the industry moves to more mature software processes (e.g., CMMI) there is increased need to adopt more rigorous, sophisticated (i.e., quantitative) metrics. While quantitative product readiness criteria are often used for business cases and related areas, software readiness is often assessed more subjectively & qualitatively. Quite often there is no explicit linkage to original performance and reliability requirements for the software. The criteria are primarily process-oriented (versus product oriented) and/or subjective. Such an approach to deciding software readiness increases the risk of poor field performance and unhappy customers. Unfortunately, creating meaningful and useful quantitative in-process metrics for software development has been notoriously difficult.

This presentation describes novel and quantitative software readiness criteria to support objective and effective decision-making at product shipment. The method organizes and streamlines existing quality and reliability data into a simple metric and visualizations that are applicable across products and releases. The methodology amalgamates two schools of thoughts in quantitative terms: product and process parameters that have been adequately represented to formalize the software readiness index. Parameters from all aspects of software development life cycle (e.g., requirements, project management & resources, development & testing, audits & assessments, stability and reliability, and technical documentation) that could impact the readiness index are considered.

Abhaya Asthana is a Bell Labs Fellow with Alcatel-Lucent where he has performed R&D in the area of End to End system & solutions, reliability engineering, converged network systems, computer architecture, IMS, IPTV, wireless systems, optical networks and VLSI design. He led the design of VLSI systems at INTEL from 1982-1985 and was on the faculty of IIT Kanpur in 1984. Dr. Asthana received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical engineering from I.I.T. Kanpur in 1970, and his Doctorate degree from Tulane University in 1974.

Jack Olivieri is a Lead Multi-Discipline System Engineer with the MITRE Corporation in the Command and Control Center (C2C) where he is responsible for support of reliability specification and analyses efforts on various defense projects for the Air Force. Previously, he worked at Alcatel-Lucent from 1998-2009 as a Reliability Tech Manager and performed DFR activities on ATM/IP switches, media gateways, and optical platforms. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Boston College and an M.S.S.E. from the University of Massachusetts.