Telecom networks are composed of very complex software-controlled systems. In recent years, business and technology needs are pushing vendors towards service agility where they must continuously develop, deliver, and improve such software over very short cycles. Moreover, being critical infrastructure, Telecom systems must meet important operational, legal, and regulatory requirements in terms of quality and performance to avoid outages. To ensure high quality software, processes and models must be put in place to enable quick and easy decision making across the development cycle. In this chapter, we will discuss the background and recent trends in software quality assurance. We will then introduce BRACE: a cloud-based, fully-automated tool for software defect prediction, reliability and availability modeling and analytics. In particular, we will discuss a novel Software Reliability Growth Modeling (SRGM) algorithm that is the core of BRACE. The algorithm provides defect prediction for both early and late stages of the software development cycle. To illustrate and validate the tool and algorithm, we also discuss key use cases, including actual defect and outage data from two large-scale software development projects from telecom products. BRACE is being successfully used by global teams of various large-scale software development projects.
Part of the book: Telecommunication Networks