Virtual Coverage: A New Approach to Coverage-Based Software Reliability Engineering

Abstract

It is common to measure multiple coverage metrics during software testing. Software reliability growth models and coverage growth functions have been applied to each coverage metric to evaluate software reliability; however, analysis results for the individual coverage metrics may conflict with each other. This paper proposes the virtual coverage metric of a normalized first principal component in order to avoid conflicting cases. The use of the virtual coverage metric causes a negligible loss of information.