Overview

Software reliability testing is a testing service that verifies and evaluates a software product’s ability to run stably under normal operation, abnormal input, resource fluctuation, fault recovery and continuous use, against the requirement specification, product description, user documentation, design documents and applicable standards. The focus includes whether the software performs according to the reliability characteristics defined in the user documentation, whether it handles errors correctly, whether it rejects illegal input, and whether it can recover after an exception or fault.

Reliability testing helps clients identify issues in continuous operation, exception handling, data protection, misoperation defence, fault recovery, logging and system stability, reducing risk during system launch, delivery and long-term operation.

The Value of Reliability Testing

Reliability testing is an important part of software quality evaluation. It helps clients confirm whether the software can run continuously, stably and correctly under specified conditions, whether it remains available under abnormal conditions, and whether it can avoid data loss or system failure.

For government bodies, enterprises and institutions, research institutes and software project owners, reliability testing can be used for software acceptance, project delivery, quality confirmation before launch, long-term operation assessment, fault recovery verification and operational risk control, providing technical support for project management and quality supervision.

Testing Basis and Evaluation Dimensions

According to GB/T 25000.51-2016, Systems and software engineering — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — Part 51: Requirements and testing details for ready-to-use software products (RUSP), the reliability of software quality is mainly evaluated from the following aspects:

Maturity

Verify whether the software meets reliability requirements under normal operating conditions. Testing can focus on whether the software runs stably when used within the limits defined in the user documentation, and whether data loss, operational failure, abnormal interruption or new errors introduced by modifications occur.

Availability

Verify whether the software can be operated and accessed normally when users need it. Testing can focus on the system’s uptime within the test period, access status and mean time between failures, and whether the system remains accessible, operable and continuously serviceable during business use.

Fault Tolerance

Verify whether the software can still operate as expected or respond reasonably when hardware, software, network, input data or the operating environment behaves abnormally. Testing can focus on whether the system freezes, fails or loses data, whether it rejects illegal input, and whether it effectively handles erroneous operations, abnormal data and out-of-limit scenarios.

Recoverability

Verify whether the software can recover affected data and rebuild the expected system state after an interruption, failure or exception. Testing can focus on the ability to restart, recover from faults, restore data and transactions, and continue running after the exception is cleared, and whether the recovery process is clear, executable and verifiable.

Our Capabilities

With a professional software evaluation team and standardised testing processes, Star River Quality provides third-party software reliability testing for government bodies, enterprises and institutions, research institutes and software development companies.

We prepare a test plan to the project’s needs, design reliability test scenarios, carry out maturity, availability, fault tolerance and recoverability testing, and record, analyse and report the issues found.

After testing, Star River Quality can issue a CNAS software test report as required for software acceptance, project delivery, system launch, long-term operation assessment, operational risk control and related quality evaluation scenarios, providing clients with objective, standardised and credible evidence of software reliability evaluation.