Abstract: Many, if not most, software practitioners feel stressed out by competitive pressures to produce more reliable software faster and cheaper. If you are now associated or expect to be associated with software practice in the future, software reliability engineering (SRE) can help. This overview is intended to give you a feel for what this standard, proven, widespread best practice is and its benefits. It should also give you insight into what matters in industrial practice and how to appeal to industrial practitioners. Such insight will help you focus your research toward significant issues and will help in teaching future practitioners.

SRE is based on two powerful ideas:

-- Quantitatively characterize the expected use of your product and then focus your resources on the most used and/or most critical functions. This increases development efficiency and hence the effective resource pool available to add customer value to your product.

-- Further increase customer value by setting quantitative reliability objectives that precisely balance customer needs for reliability, timely delivery, and cost; engineer project strategies to meet them; and track reliability in test as a release criterion.

Short Bio: John D. Musa is one of the creators of SRE, with more than 30 years experience as software development practitioner and manager. He is principal author of the widely-acclaimed pioneering book Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application and author of the eminently practical books Software Reliability Engineering: More Reliable Software, Faster Development and Testing and Software Reliability Engineering: More Reliable Software Faster and Cheaper -- Second Edition. The latter (actually almost totally new) was published in late 2004. Musa has published more than 100 papers on SRE. He currently teaches short courses worldwide, transferring SRE technology and practice to world leaders in software development.

Elected IEEE Fellow in 1986 for many seminal contributions, he was recognized in 1992 as the leading contributor to testing technology. The IEEE Reliability Society named him Engineer of the Year in 2004. His leadership has been noted by every edition of Who's Who in America since 1990 and by American Men and Women of Science. Musa, widely recognized as the leader in SRE practice, initiated and led the effort that convinced AT&T to make SRE a "Best Current Practice."