Software Reliability: How to Achieve One Hundred Percent?
Narayan C. Debnath, Ph. D, D. Sc.
Director and Past President
International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA)
Minnesota, USA
Abstract
Any industry such as automotive, oil, telecommunications, banking, e-business, automation and others are highly dependent on computers for their basic operations. The size and complexity of computer-based systems has been growing at a faster rate during the past decade and this trend will certainly continue in the future. Any well-engineered software typically should have few common attributes including maintainability, efficiency, reliability and an appropriate user interface. The goal is to maximize all these attributes based on the available resources and environment. Software reliability can be defined to be a measure of how well it provides services expected of it by the users. It is desirable to have software with highest possible reliability. However, it appears that a little increase of reliability or efficiency or any other attribute causes a significant increase in cost. As a result, it is expected to have an appropriate level of reliability as the circumstances allow. To enhance the software reliability and quality, a focus can be directed towards software validation methods. This keynote presentation will provide fundamental concepts of software reliability, reliabilitymodels and analysis, and major perspective and techniques of software validation in order to address the issues and limitations towards maximizing software reliability for a large and complex software systems.
Short Biography:
Professor Narayan Debnath is the Director and the Past President of the International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA), USA. Formerly, he was a Professor and Chairperson of Computer Science at Winona State University, USA. Dr. Debnath is a recipient of a Doctorate degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate degree inPhysics. In the past, he served as the President, Vice President, and Conference Coordinator of the International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA). He received numerous Honors and Awards, and authored and co-authored over 350 research publications in conference proceedings and journals. During 1986-1989, Dr. Debnath was a faculty of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, USA, where he was nominated for the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989.
Professor Debnath has made numerous teaching and research presentations at various national and international conferences, industries, and teaching and research institutions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. He has been serving as an international teaching and research advisor/coordinator of the Master of Software Engineering Program at the National Universities in Argentina, South America, since 2000. He offered courses and workshops on Software Engineering and Software Testing at the universities in South America, Asia, and Middle East.
Dr. Debnath served as the General Chair, Program Chair, invited Keynote Speaker, Tutorial Chair, and Session Organizer and Chair of the international conferences sponsored by various professional societies including the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), International Association of Computer and Information Science (ACIS), International Association for Science and Technology in Education (IASTED), Arab Computer Society, and the International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA). Dr. Debnath is a member of the ACM, IEEE Computer Society, Arab Computer Society, and a senior member of ISCA.