Reliability Analysis Considering the Component Collision Behavior for a Large‐scale Open Source Solution

Open source software systems that serve as key components of critical infrastructures in the society are still ever‐expanding now. Many open source software systems are developed in all parts of the world, that is, Firefox, Apache HTTP server, Linux, Android, and so on. Especially, a large‐scale open source solution composed of several open source software is now attracting attention as a next‐generation software development paradigm because of the cost reduction, quick delivery, and work saving. In this paper, we propose a new approach to software reliability assessment based on stochastic differential equations and a hierarchical Bayesian model in order to consider the interesting aspect of the collision status in the binding phase of open source software. Also, we analyze actual software fault‐count data to show numerical examples of software reliability assessment considering the component collision for several open source software. Moreover, we show that the proposed reliability analysis can assist improvement of quality for the large‐scale open source solution. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.