The difficulties of building generic reliability models for software

Abstract

The Software Engineering research community have spent considerable effort in developing models to predict the behaviour of software. A number of these models have been derived based on the pre and post behaviour of the development of software products, but when these models are applied to other products, the results are often disappointing. This appears to differentiate Software from other engineering disciplines that often depend on generic predictive models to verify the correctness of their products. This short paper discusses why other engineering disciplines have managed to create generalized models, the challenges faced by the Software industry to build these models, and the change we have made to our process in Microsoft to address some of these challenges.