Estimate software reliability growth

Estimate long-run software reliability growth with a power-law nonhomogeneous Poisson process, bootstrap trend evidence, and future incident exposure.

What it's for

Distinguishes durable reliability improvement from a constant or worsening incident baseline and turns the trend into forward incident risk.

What you give it

Inputs split into evidence read from your connected systems, calibration your team owns, and numerical controls that affect precision but never the result's meaning.

Field Type Role Required
bootstrap_draws integer ≥ 200, ≤ 20000 Numerical control Optional
confidence_level number ≥ 0.8, ≤ 0.999 Your calibration Optional
horizons_after_observation_days array of number ≥ 1 item Evidence Yes
max_detail_rows integer ≥ 1, ≤ 5000 Numerical control Optional
seed integer Numerical control Optional
systems array of objects (3 fields) Evidence Yes

Each systems record

Field Type Required
id string (non-empty) Yes
incident_times_days array of number (≥ 8 items) Yes
observation_end_days number (> 0) Yes
Example input
{
  "bootstrap_draws": 200,
  "horizons_after_observation_days": [
    30,
    90
  ],
  "seed": 3,
  "systems": [
    {
      "id": "checkout-service",
      "incident_times_days": [
        0.05161955923550008,
        0.2479796737906886,
        0.5144496422295098,
        0.8319499619482423,
        1.1912910440166142,
        1.5867851514329019,
        2.0144752596476954,
        2.471409216800811,
        2.9552788473745992,
        3.4642174931764935,
        3.9966765162190416,
        4.551345156042946,
        5.1270959750477365,
        5.722946279669972,
        6.3380299764748,
        6.971576501395341,
        7.622894694490652,
        8.291360224997495,
        8.976405623597778,
        9.677512267545591,
        10.394203854139318,
        11.126041026088336,
        11.872616900689994,
        12.633553316946166,
        13.408497659346127,
        14.197120149535808,
        14.999111521118527,
        15.814181010835721,
        16.64205461303338,
        17.48247355479738,
        18.335192957262347,
        19.199980654954977,
        20.076616150051013,

Truncated for display — the full payload is 116 lines.

What you get back

This is the actual output of running the example above — computed by the same function the platform calls, not an illustration.

Example output
{
  "assumptions": [
    "Incident arrivals follow a power-law nonhomogeneous Poisson process over a stable observation boundary with complete event capture.",
    "The growth shape is constant over the window; major architecture, traffic, reporting, or severity-definition changes require stratification or a new epoch.",
    "A shape below one means declining incident intensity and reliability growth; it does not prove that any particular engineering intervention caused the improvement.",
    "This long-run baseline-trend model complements rather than replaces short-run self-exciting incident-cluster and dependency-cascade models."
  ],
  "decision": "reliability_growth_evidence_available",
  "method": "power_law_process_software_reliability_growth_v1",
  "portfolio": {
    "detail_rows_returned": 1,
    "detail_rows_truncated": 0,
    "deteriorating_systems": 0,
    "improving_systems": 1,
    "inconclusive_systems": 0,
    "systems": 1
  },
  "systems": [
    {
      "current_incident_intensity_per_day": 0.702432,
      "current_mean_time_between_incidents_days": 1.423626,
      "fit": {
        "bootstrap_attempts": 200,
        "bootstrap_draws": 200,
        "cumulative_intensity_scale": 3.93674214,
        "incidents": 100,
        "observation_end_days": 100
      },
      "forecasts": [
        {
          "expected_incidents": 20.2368,
          "expected_incidents_interval": {
            "high": 26.4348,
            "low": 15.1882
          },
          "homogeneous_rate_expected_incidents": 30,
          "horizon_days": 30,
          "probability_at_least_one_incident": 1
        },
        {
          "expected_incidents": 56.9659,
          "expected_incidents_interval": {
            "high": 76.3508,
            "low": 41.8621

Truncated for display — the full payload is 60 lines.

How it works

Forecasting & survival — Estimate when something completes or fails, with censoring and unresolved work handled honestly rather than dropped.

  1. 1 Estimate long-run software reliability growth with a power-law nonhomogeneous Poisson process, bootstrap trend evidence, and future incident exposure.
  2. 2 Evaluate the method-specific diagnostics and gates returned by the function, then abstain unless the declared decision clears them under locally governed thresholds.

Before you trust it

Every tool in the catalog ships with the conditions under which its answer is meaningful — and the conditions under which it should abstain instead of guessing.

Assumptions & guardrails

  • Training examples precede their outcomes, censoring and unresolved work are represented, and deployment populations remain comparable to validation cohorts.
  • A predictive interval or risk estimate is not a deadline promise, causal explanation, or individual-performance judgment.

Minimum evidence

  • systems: required and organization-defined
  • horizons_after_observation_days: at least 1 rows/items

How to validate it

Validate on future periods or held-out aggregate units, compare with a simple baseline, and require stability across plausible metric definitions and decision thresholds.

Calibrating it to your org

Same for everyone

The mathematical kernel, validation rules, method version, and JSON output semantics are organization-independent; no tenant-trained coefficients or company benchmark is embedded in the function.

Specific to you

  • incident time in days since a fixed window start
  • forecast horizons
  • incident inclusion/severity policy

Calibration workflow

  1. 1 Define the management decision, target outcome, aggregate unit, privacy boundary, cadence, and prediction/intervention horizon for this organization.
  2. 2 Build a tenant-scoped historical cohort using only information available before each prediction or decision; preserve zero periods, censoring, assignment probabilities, and unresolved outcomes when the method requires them.
  3. 3 Estimate statistical parameters on training history, but obtain costs, utilities, risk tolerance, practical-effect thresholds, capacity, and policy constraints from accountable decision owners.
  4. 4 Validate on later time windows or held-out aggregate units at the deployment grain, against a simple baseline and the function-specific validation strategy.
  5. 5 Deploy only if the returned decision clears evidence, overlap, calibration, robustness, and guardrail checks; warning, unsupported, schema-gap, and fallback decisions are abstentions.
  6. 6 Monitor realized outcomes, data drift, coverage, and decision regret; recalibrate at a governed cadence or after a detected regime/definition change, never merely because a stakeholder dislikes the result.

Call it from your AI

You don't wire up 388 tools in your MCP client. The GitRevio MCP server exposes 18 tools, three of which let an agent search the catalog, read a tool's schema, and run it — so the assistant finds this one on its own.

gitrevio_capabilities_search
  { "q": "estimate longrun software reliability growth with" }
  → finds "estimate_software_reliability_growth"

gitrevio_capability_describe
  { "capability_id": "estimate_software_reliability_growth" }
  → returns the input schema and agent guidance shown on this page

gitrevio_capability_run
  { "capability_id": "estimate_software_reliability_growth", "arguments": { ... } }
  → returns the result shown above

Works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Goose and Aider. See the MCP server.

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