Kapur, P.K.Anand, SameerYamada, ShigeruYadavalli, Venkata S. Sarma2010-02-172010-02-172009Kapur, PK, Anand, S, Yamada, S & Yadavalli VSS 2009, 'Stochastic differential equation based flexible software reliability growth model', Mathematical Problems in Engineering, vol. 2009. [http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/]1024-123X10.1155/2009/581383http://hdl.handle.net/2263/13084Several software reliability growth models (SRGMs) have been developed by software developers in tracking and measuring the growth of reliability. As the size of software system is large and the number of faults detected during the testing phase becomes large, so the change of the number of faults that are detected and removed through each debugging becomes sufficiently small compared with the initial fault content at the beginning of the testing phase. In such a situation, we can model the software fault detection process as a stochastic process with continuous state space. In this paper, we propose a new software reliability growth model based on Itô type of stochastic differential equation. We consider an SDE-based generalized Erlang model with logistic error detection function. The model is estimated and validated on real-life data sets cited in literature to show its flexibility. The proposed model integrated with the concept of stochastic differential equation performs comparatively better than the existing NHPP-based models.en© 2009 P. K. Kapur et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Maximum likelihoodData setsCoefficient of multiple determinationStatistical package for social sciencesMean square errorPrediction errorRoot mean square prediction errorFault detection rateSoftware Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs)Prediction fault contentReliability of softwareFlexible SRGMsStochastic differential equationsSoftware measurementComputer software -- VerificationArticle