RELIABILITY PREDICTION AND ESTIMATION OF PROLOG PROGRAMS

This paper presents an approach to reliability prediction and estimati on of Prolog programs, and introduces 2 complexity measures for Prolog programs. The structural complexity measure refers to the program's s tatic characteristics: size & number of clauses, clause arguments (num ber & types), and clause types (facts or rules). The operational compl exity measure refers to the program's dynamic characteristics: executi on frequency of program components, user behavior, and backtracking & recursion. Values of the two measures are used to: 1) predict Prolog- program reliability before testing and in the early testing stages, an d 2) estimate the reliability as a function of time, in order to deter mine whether the reliability objective is achieved. The feature-orient ed reliability determination approach leads to improvements in the acc uracy of software-reliability predictions & estimations.