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STRAIT: A Tool for Automated Software Reliability Growth Analysis

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Reliability is an essential attribute of mission-and safety-critical systems. Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) are regression-based models that use historical failure data to predict the reliability-related parameters. At the moment, there is no dedicated tool available that would be able to cover the whole process of SRGMs data preparation and application from issue repositories, discouraging replications and reuse in other projects. In this paper, we introduce STRAIT, a free and open-source tool for automatic software reliability growth analysis which utilizes data from issue repositories. STRAIT features downloading, filtering and processing of data from provided issue repositories for use in multiple SRGMs, suggesting the best fitting SRGM with multiple data snapshots to consider software evolution. The tool is designed to be highly extensible, in terms of additional issue repositories, SRGMs, and new data filtering and processing options. Quality engineers can use STRAIT for the evaluation of their software systems. The research community can use STRAIT for empirical studies which involve evaluation of new SRGMs or comparison of multiple SRGMs.
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STRAIT: A Tool for Automated Software
Reliability Growth Analysis
Stanislav Chren, Radoslav Micko, Barbora Buhnova, Bruno Rossi
Faculty of Informatics,Masaryk University
Brno, Czech Republic
{chren, r.micko, buhnova, brossi}@mail.muni.cz
Abstract
Pre-print of the paper Chren, S., Micko, R., Buhnova, B., Rossi, B.: STRAIT: A Tool for Automated Software Reliability Growth Analysis. To
appear in MSR 2019.
Reliability is an essential attribute of mission-
and safety-critical systems. Software Reliability Growth Models
(SRGMs) are regression-based models that use historical failure
data to predict the reliability-related parameters. At the moment,
there is no dedicated tool available that would be able to cover the
whole process of SRGMs data preparation and application from
issue repositories, discouraging replications and reuse in other
projects. In this paper, we introduce STRAIT, a free and open-
source tool for automatic software reliability growth analysis
which utilizes data from issue repositories. STRAIT features
downloading, filtering and processing of data from provided
issue repositories for use in multiple SRGMs, suggesting the best
fitting SRGM with multiple data snapshots to consider software
evolution. The tool is designed to be highly extensible, in terms of
additional issue repositories, SRGMs, and new data filtering and
processing options. Quality engineers can use STRAIT for the
evaluation of their software systems. The research community
can use STRAIT for empirical studies which involve evaluation
of new SRGMs or comparison of multiple SRGMs.
Index Terms—Software Reliability Growth Model, Reliability
Analysis, Issue Repository, Issue Report Filtering, Automated
Tool
I. INTRODUCTION
Various critical infrastructures, such as power grids,
telecommunication, transportation or financial services are
controlled by software systems. For such systems, reliability is
an essential qualitative attribute. Software Reliability Growth
Models (SRGMs) are one of the most well-established ap-
proaches for software reliability analysis [1]–[3].
SRGMs can be used to predict reliability of a system in
terms of the number of faults, probability of failure or effort
needed to reach a required reliability level, which can help
with release planning.
Nowadays, SRGMs face several challenges. First, the main
models supported by existing tools were developed 20-30
years ago when software development followed mostly the
waterfall lifecycle. Therefore, their applicability to modern
projects is questionable since they do not account for situations
that occur in agile project lifecycles. For example, the software
reliability growth curve cannot describe the situation where
developers stop testing multiple times during the iterative
development. As a result, SRGMs provide output which either
under- or overestimates the expected reliability values [4].
Furthermore, the current SRGM tooling support can be
decades old and has limited support for extensions with new
models developed to tackle the issues of modern projects.
Lack of proper tools affects also the research community.
Many studies which propose new SRGMs [4]–[6] use both
custom-made scripts and private datasets for the evaluation of
the models. The unavailability of the scripts and the datasets
decreases the possibility of reuse and replication of the results.
The unavailability of datasets for model evaluation could
be solved by leveraging existing public issue repositories,
such as Github. However, the data from issue repositories
needs to be filtered and processed first, to become usable in
SRGM analysis [7]. Ideally, the whole procedure of dataset
preparation and application of SRGMs should be automated.
Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no existing tool
can support the whole process.
In this paper, we propose a new open source tool that aims
at addressing the challenges of SRGM analysis of modern
software projects by utilizing data available in open issue
repositories. The tool is intended to be fully automated and
highly extensible. It supports downloading of the issue reports
from repositories, the filtration and processing of the data, the
application of SRGMs as well as the evaluation of results.
The paper is structured as follows: Section II gives an
overview of related tools. Section III details the context of
software reliability analysis with SRGMs. In Section IV, we
present the STRAIT tool, its architecture and features. Section
V outlines the main usage scenarios for our tool.
II. RE LATE D WORK
Over the years, there have been several dedicated tools
developed which provide software reliability analysis via
SRGMs (Table I).
TABLE I
OVE RVIE W OR SRGM AN ALYS IS TO OLS
Name Language #SRGMs Year Licence
SMERFS [8] Fortran 12 1988 Free/Open-source
SRMP [9] Fortran 9 1988 Proprietary
SOFTREL [10] C 2 1991 Free
CASRE [11] Fortran 16 1993 Free
SOREL [12] Pascal 4 1993 Free
SREPT [13] Java 1 2000 Free
RGA [14] - 3 2006 Proprietary
SRT [15] Java 11 2007 Free/Open-source
Many of the existing tools started to emerge some 30 years
ago, with only minor evolution in the past decades. This causes
issues with their execution in modern operating systems, and
their aged user interface. In the past, the lack of interest in
supporting modern tools might have been caused by difficult
access to suitable datasets. Nowadays, various open source
code and issue repositories exist, such as Github, Bitbucket,
and Sourceforge. The issue reports in these repositories can
be filled by both developers and the community of users,
providing a potentially rich data source for the SRGMs.
Furthermore, although most of the tools are free, only two of
them (SMERFS and SRT) have source code available. Still,
they do not provide any documentation of the possibilities
of the tools’ extension. Tools such as SMERFS, CASRE or
SRT offer a large selection of SRGMs. However, many more
models were introduced after the tools were released [16] and
there is no tool available that could support them (besides
generic mathematical software). Additionally, all of the tools
require raw-processed data about fault or failure occurrences
for input. They do not offer any automated way of extracting
the input data directly from projects issue repositories. Many
of the existing tools offer additional functionality related to
reliability analysis, such as support for Markov model analysis,
and simulation or metrics-based approaches. With STRAIT,
we aim at offering a more specialized tool that focuses only on
the SRGMs analysis and convenient processing of input data.
Instead of providing a complete software reliability analysis
suite, we want to offer a tool that is simple to use and can
be easily extended in order to adapt to future trends in the
application of SRGMs.
III. SOF TWAR E RELIABILITY GROWTH MODELS
The reliability analysis models can be broadly classified
into black-box and white-box models [17]. The former models
analyse the reliability of the system as a whole or at the level
of its main components, while the latter consider the internal
structure of the system and also focus on behavioural aspects
of its components [18].
In this paper, we are addressing SRGMs which are among
the oldest and most widely applied black box reliability pre-
diction approaches. The first SRGM was proposed by Jelinsky
and Moranda in 1972 [1], and since then more than 100 models
have been introduced [16]. Table II shows an overview of basic
SRGMs that are also supported by STRAIT.
During the testing and early operation phases of software
life cycle, failure events are encountered. They are recorded
and the underlying faults that caused them are removed, which
results in a process called reliability growth. SRGMs are
regression-based models whose purpose is to estimate the
parameters of a mean value function m(t)based on the input
data: m(t)represents cumulative number of faults detected by
the given time t.
Based on the shape of m(t), we can classify SRGMs into
three main categories [2] (see Fig. 1):
Concave models – they assume that the total number of
faults in software is finite and that it is possible to achieve
fault-free software in finite time.
S-shaped models – they also assume that the total number
of faults is finite. Furthermore, they assume that early
Fig. 1. Basic SRGMs shapes: Concave (left), S-shaped (middle) and Infi-
nite (right)
testing is not as effective in fault discovery as the testing
in the later stages. Therefore, there is a period in which
the number of faults is increasing.
Infinite models – they assume that it is not possible to
develop fault-free software, because during faults removal
we can introduce new ones.
The process of SRGMs application consists of several steps
(as shown in Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Process of SRGM application
The first step is to prepare the input data. The bug reports
obtained during testing or operation serve as the main source
of input data. One problem that arises is that bug reports
usually contain information about failures and not about
underlying faults. Ideally, the reports should be processed first
to identify the faults which caused the failures and only these
faults should be considered in SRGM analysis. However, this
process can be very time consuming. Therefore, it is possible
to process the bug report just to filter out duplicate entries.
Afterwards, reports are considered as substitutes for faults.
The technical report of Wood [3] shows that this procedure
can still provide credible results. Issue reports can be further
filtered so that they fit into the SRGMs assumptions as closely
as possible.
The second step is to perform a statistical test such as
Laplace’s trend test to determine whether a trend of decreasing
number of failures can be observed. If such a trend cannot be
observed, it means there is no reliability growth in the data
and the SRGMs would not provide reasonable results.
Next, the SRGM is selected for the application. Since
there is no single model that would fit all projects, it is
recommended that multiple models are used and the one that
describes the data most accurately is selected. To get results
from SRGMs, the model’s parameters need to be estimated
based on input data. For parameter estimation, either the
Maximum likelihood method or the Minimum least squares
method are typically used.
Once the parameters are estimated, it is necessary to per-
form a goodness-of-fit test to evaluate how well the model fits
the data. It can be performed by common statistical methods,
such as computing the correlation coefficient, a Kolmogorov-
Smirnov test, a Chi-square test and others. Based on the
results, we can select the most appropriate SRGM.
With the model selected, SRGMs can be used to predict a
variety of failure data. These include future failure intensity,
number of remaining faults, or testing effort required to
achieve a given reliability level.
TABLE II
OVE RVIE W OF BA SIC SRGMS
Model Type m(t)
Goel-Okumoto [19] Concave a(1 ebt )
Goel-Okumoto S-Shaped [20] S-Shaped a(1(1 + bt)ebt)
Hossain-Dahiya [21] Concave a(1ebt)
(1+cebt)
Musa-Okumoto [22] Infinite αln(βt + 1)
Duane [23] Infinite αtβ
IV. SOF TWAR E RELIABILITY ANALYSI S TOO L
STRAIT is a command-line tool written in Java. For the
parts requiring mathematical computations, an interface for
R-Project [24] is used. The tool is multi-platform, capable
of running on MS Windows and Unix-based systems. It is
provided as open source under the MIT license. In this section
we present an overall architecture and features of the tool.
A. Architecture
STRAIT consists of 10 main components as shown in
Fig. 3. The Core component handles orchestration of other
components. The remaining components are responsible for
specific stages of the SRGM application process (as shown in
Fig. 2).
Fig. 3. STRAIT’s main components
The Data Provider component is responsible for getting
issue reports from specified data sources. Currently, STRAIT
is able to download issue reports from projects in Github
repositories. The raw issue reports are then mapped to Gen-
eralIssue objects, which are stored in the local storage.
The storage management is done by the Persistence com-
ponent, which uses an embedded Derby database. If required,
the stored data can be exported to CSV files so that they can
be reused also by other tools. STRAIT allows the creation
of snapshots. Snapshots represent named collections of issue
reports for a particular software project and the SRGM anal-
ysis is conducted on a specified snapshot. An initial snapshot
can be created from the set of issues obtained from the Data
Provider. This way, it is not necessary to download the issue
reports from repositories every time the tool is executed.
Further snapshots can be generated by the application of
different data filtration and processing options. The snapshot
feature simplifies reuse of the same input data across multiple
experiments. The Data Processing component contains various
filters and data processors which can filter or modify stored
data based on the selected criteria (see Section IV-B for more
details).
The Model component holds the implementations of the
SRGMs. Currently implemented models are shown in Table
II. The Model receives input data for SRGM analysis from
the Core component (which in turn retrieves them from the
Persistence component after being processed by the Data
Processor). The Model component then uses the Trend test
component to perform trend test on the data—at this moment,
Laplace’s trend test is implemented. Afterwards, the Solver
component is used to estimate the model parameters. We
support the Minimum least squares method for parameter
estimation. With the parameters estimated, the Goodness-of-fit
component evaluates the fit of the data and the model with the
Chi-square test.
Finally, the Output component takes care of generating
output with results of SRGM analysis. STRAIT supports either
generation of plain text files which are more suitable for
automated processing or HTML files which are more human-
readable. Both text and HTML files contain information about
the models used, the estimated parameters, the results of the
trend test and the goodnes-of-fit test with the list of applied
data filters and processors together with their parameters.
Moreover, the HTML output also contains an interactive visual
representation of the mean value functions of SRGMs. A
sample output is available at STRAIT.
The whole execution of STRAIT is highly customizable.
The execution options are handled by the Config component.
The options can be specified as command-line arguments, or
they can be stored in multiple configuration files enabling
reusability of the configurations.
B. Data Filtering and Processing
STRAIT offers two mechanisms for manipulation of the
data downloaded from issue repositories. First, the Data Filters
are used to reduce the number of issues retrieved from a
repository. Some issues might for example represent feature
requests or problems not resulting in failures, which are not
relevant for the SRGM analysis. Furthermore, some issues
might need to be filtered out so that the input data follow
the assumptions of the individual SRGMs. For example, we
might require only issues representing a critical problem,
issues that have been fixed or issues that appeared only after
the software release [5]. Additionally, filters can be used to
limit the scope of the analysis by focusing only on issues
for particular software component or during a specified time
period. Presently, the STRAIT tool allows filtering based on
the general issue attributes which are shown in Table III.
Second, STRAIT uses Data Processors for modifying the
issues. This can be used for transforming issue reports into
data representations used by the SRGMs. Moreover, they
can be used for changing the values of issue attributes, for
TABLE III
OVE RVIE W OF ATTR IB UTE S FO R ISS UE FI LTER ING
Attribute Type Attribute Type
createdAt Date htmlUrl String
closedAt Date labels String[]
updatedAt Date userName String
comments String[] userEmail String
number int milestoneCreatedAt Date
body String milestoneDueOn Date
state String milestoneDescription String
title String milestoneState String
url String milestoneTitle String
example by enriching the list of issue’s labels based on some
textual analysis or changing the structure of the issue bodies
or anonymizing the authors of issue reports.
C. Extensibility
The possibility to extend or provide new implementations of
the main components is one of the main features of STRAIT.
The extensibility is achieved via using interfaces as depen-
dencies between the components following the Dependency
Inversion (DI) design principle [25]. This way, the addition
of new features is possible by providing new implementation
of the interfaces either directly or by extending the default
classes implementing the interfaces. In STRAIT, the following
extensions are available:
Data source – by implementing the DataProvider in-
terface, it is possible to add support for different data
sources, such as different issue repositories, or even
databases or text files.
Filters and Processors – new filtering and data processing
methods can be added by implementing the DataPro-
cessor and DataFilter interfaces. This could include for
example a complex filtering of issues based on parsing
issues’ bodies and comments via textual analysis methods
or methods utilising machine-learning techniques.
Output generators – implementation of the OutputWriter
interface enables generation of output into additional file
formats.
Models – new SRGMs can be added by implementing
the Model interface.
Computation methods - additional methods for trend
testing, parameter estimation and goodness-of-fit testing
can be implemented via their respective interfaces.
V. USAG E SCE NARIOS
In this section, we briefly outline several possible usage
scenarios of STRAIT.
A. Reliability analysis of software projects
The tool can be used for reliability analysis of selected
software projects by providing predictions of future failure
occurrences, about total faults in the software and the time
required to reach the desired reliability level. Since the tool
can be configured to run autonomously, it can be integrated
with existing continuous integration tools to provide reliabil-
ity estimates throughout the whole development cycle. The
developers or quality engineers could configure it to target
the analysis of specific components or project versions. Due
to its extensibility, the tool can be customized to meet any
project-specific needs. For example, the integration can lead
to software reliability growth models integrated in the software
debugging process [26].
B. Empirical evaluation of new SRGMs
STRAIT’s architecture allows the extension with additional
models. Since STRAIT enables access to a large number
of projects and their issue repositories, the new models can
be evaluated on a variety of input data from different types
of projects (for example, by providing a large-scale evalu-
ation of a model in the context of open source software
projects [27]—such as the one described in Aggarwal et
al. [28]). Furthermore, with the ability to create data snapshots
and configuration files, multiple models can be compared
on the same datasets and with the same parameters which
increases replicability of the experiments.
C. Investigation of applicability of SRGMs in modern projects
Many of the commonly used SRGMs were developed
decades ago and target larger-scale projects developed with a
waterfall development lifecycle. However, nowadays the agile
development methodologies are prevalent. It is unclear to what
extent the SRGMs can be used to analyse such projects—as
discussed, for example, in Rawat et al. [29]. The STRAIT tool
can help with the investigation of the models’ applicability due
to the access to many datasets from modern projects.
D. Supporting textual analysis and issue classification
SRGMs models can integrate knowledge derived from text
mining research for the classification of bug reports. For
example, STRAIT and SRGMs can be useful to determine the
priorities of the bug-fixing process by complementing features
derived from text analysis—as presented in Kumari et al. [30].
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented STRAIT, a new tool for reliabil-
ity analysis based on SRGMs. The main features of STRAIT
are the utilization of online issue repositories as sources for
input data, the automated execution and support for the whole
process of SRGM analysis, including the data filtration and
processing as well as the evaluation of results. Moreover, the
tool is designed with high extensibility in mind to allow future
enhancement of all its components. The tool is applicable to a
variety of scenarios for software developers, quality engineers
and the research community.
In our future work, we will focus on providing support for
additional issue repositories and improve the data processing
capabilities of the tool.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by ERDF ”CyberSecurity,
CyberCrime and Critical Information Infrastructures Center of
Excellence” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16 019/0000822).
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APPENDIX A
TOO L INS TALL ATION AND AVAILABILITY
A. Tool Availability
The tool is available as open-source under the MIT license
for free. The project website is at: https://lasaris.fi.muni.cz/
STRAIT. The website contains the source code, compiled
binaries, user manual and sample examples with showcase of
output.
B. Tool Requirements
Java, version 8+: https://www.java.com/en/
R Project, version 3.5.0+: https://cloud.r-project.org/
C. Installation for MS Windows
1) If Java is not installed, run the Java installer.
2) Append Java bin directory to the environment PATH
variable, e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.
0_171\bin
3) If R Project is not installed, run the installer.
4) Run the R.exe and in the console, install the rJava
package: install.packages("rJava")
5) Set the environment variables for R Project:
R_HOME= Path-to-R-install-directory
e.g. R_HOME = C:\Program Files\R-3.5.
1
path = \%R_HOME\%\bin\x64
path = \%R_HOME\%\library\rJava\
libs\x64
path = \%R_HOME\%\library\rJava\
jri\x64
If 32-bit operating system is used the \x64 part should
be replaced with \i386
D. Installation for Unix
The Unix installation assumes that the Aptitude package
manager is available. The following commands should be
executed via terminal.
1) sudo apt-get install default-jdk.
2) sudo apt-key adv keyserver
keyserver.ubuntu.com recv-keys
E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
3) sudo add-apt-repository deb https:
//cloud.r-project.org/bin /linux/
ubuntu bionic-cran35/
4) sudo apt-get install r-base
5) sudo -i R
6) install.packages(rJava)
7) Set the R_HOME variable
E. Tool usage
The tool can be executed from command-line by running:
java -jar strait.jar [OPTIONS]
For options, multiple arguments can be used. An overview of
command-line options is in Table IV. The tool also prints a
list of all options if no argument is provided. The help for
each option can be accessed by running:
java -jar strait.jar --help OptionName
A simple execution of the tool to evaluate the spring-boot
project hosted at Github may look like:
java -jar STRAIT.jar --url https://
github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot
--evaluate --filterLabel bug error
fault issue fail defect --filterTime
2018-01-01 2018-12-01 --snapshotName
springBoot --solver ls
With the --url option, we specify the location of the project.
The option --evaluate states the intention to execute the
SRGM analysis. We do not specify any particular models,
therefore, all of the available SRGMs will be applied. The
--filterLabel option is followed by a list of labels.
Issue reports which do not contain any of the labels will be
filtered out. Furthermore, with --filterTime we limit the
time period for which Issue reports will be considered. With
the --snapshotName option, we specify the name of the
snapshot for storing the gathered issues. At the second run, the
snapshot name can be provided instead of the URL: the local
data stored in the snapshot will be used for the analysis. The
--solver option specifies that the minimum least squares
solver will be used for parameter estimation.
TABLE IV
OVE RVIE W OF TH E CO MMA ND -LINE OPTIONS
Short
option
Long option Arguments
-h --help
-url [Repository URL]
-asl --allSnapshotsList —
-sn --snapshotName —
-cf [Path to config file]
-sl --snapshotsList
-s --save [Data format]
-e --evaluate
-p --predict [Number of time units for pre-
diction]
-ns --newSnapshot [Name of the new snapshot]
-fl --filterLabel [Label names]
-fc --filterClosed
-ft --filterTime [From] [To]
-ms --models [Models]
-pt --periodOfTesting [Testing period time unit]
-tb --timBetweenIssues [Time unit for TBF]
-gm --graphMultiple
-so --solver [Solver]
-out [Output type]
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