Software Reliability Experimentation and Control

This paper classifies software researches as theoreticalresearches, experimental researches, and engineering researches, and ismainly concerned with the experimental researches with focus onsoftware reliability experimentation and control. The state-of-the-artof experimental or empirical studies is reviewed. A new experimentationmethodology is proposed, which is largely theory discovering oriented.Several unexpected results of experimental studies are presented tojustify the importance of software reliability experimentation andcontrol. Finally, a few topics that deserve future investigation areidentified.