The extended operational profile model for usage-based software testing

Operational profiles are a quantification of customer usage patterns for a software application. These profiles are used to measure software reliability by testing the software in a manner that represents customer use. The current definition of an operational profile states that it is the set of operations available in the application, and the operations' probabilities of occurrence in customer usage scenarios. This definition is too limited. In most industrial applications, focusing on operations alone does not offer adequate representation of the use of software. The limited definition of operational profiles has restricted their applicability and hence software reliability analysis for many software development organizations. Our work provides a formal and practical extension of the current definition of operational profiles to increase their applicability.; The extended operational profile model is composed of three parts that address realistic software execution. The first part is taken from the original model and consists of the operations and the probabilities with which they occur in execution. The second part captures the configuration of the application and the environment in which it is executed. The third part captures the values of the data that is passed to the application. An industrial case study is used to demonstrate the validity of the model by showing that particular recorded defects may be discovered using the new model. Use of the extended operational profile is enabled with a framework and a toolkit. The framework incorporates the model into a general software development life cycle, and the toolkit automates the process of extracting the extended operational profile from log files of software usage.