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A study of application of Software Reliability Growth Models to the development of Open Source projects

Software reliability growth models are mathematical models used to estimate the numerical features of the reliability of a project based on the testing data for some period. Though various reliability growth models exist, the criteria of selection of a model for the given project are not defined completely. Thus it is important to find a method of comparison of the models for applying the models and acquiring sensible results. This article surveys various software reliability growth models to examine the applicability of the models to open source projects and to define the method of their use; experiments with several large-scale open source projects are described. As a result of the experiments, various characteristics of the reliability of the selected projects were obtained, and hypotheses about the common features of the open source projects were formulated.