Software Engineering - Old Questions

12. Write Short notes on:

    a. Reliability validation

    b. Reverse engineering

a. Reliability validation

Reliability validation is the process of measuring the reliability of a system. To validate that the system meets these requirements, we have to measure the reliability of the system as seen by typical system user.

Reliability validation process:

  1. Establish the operational profile for the system.

  2. Construct test data reflecting the operational profile

  3. Test the system and observe the number of failures and the times of these failures.

  4. Compute the reliability after a statistically significant number of failures have been observed.

b. Reverse engineering

The objective of reverse engineering is to derive the design and specification of a system from its source code. It is the process of analyzing a program in an effort to create a representation of the program at a higher level of abstraction than source. The program itself is unchanged by the reverse engineering process. The software source code is usually available as the input.

Reverse engineering process: