A quality engineering approach to human factors affecting software reliability in design process

To improve software quality and manufacturabilty, the software errors that are the human errors or defects affecting software reliability and the huma n factors causing these errors must be explained, and measures to prevent t heir generation must be devised. There has been some research on explaining the human factors affecting software reliability. However, this research o nly proposed models (hypotheses) to explain the cause-and-effect relationsh ips with the software errors generated by the human factors and almost none of this research verified these models through testing. In this paper, we studied the software design process that has a substantial effect on removi ng and preventing software errors during software development, and performe d development tests to explain the human factors affecting software reliabi lity and their correlations. Here, we applied the quality engineering appro ach based on test planning methods, explained the relationship between soft ware design and the generated software errors, and gained an understanding of the effects of the adopted human factors. (C) 2001 Scripta Technica, Ele ctron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 85(3): 33-42, 2002.