Abstract: It is very important to select and use appropriate software reliability metrics(SRMs) for software intensive systems. Therefore there are some approaches presented for effectively selecting SRMs. However, almost all of these approaches didn't consider the software integrity which is a very important design attribute with the unique ability to conlain risk which combines the frequency and the consequence of software failure. Thus we suggested that the integrity is a significant factor which affects the final software reliability or safety and should be considered for selecting the suitable SRMs. This paper proposed an integrity-level-based framework with which software organizations can systemically and effectively identify and select the suitable SRMs respectively to satisfy the integrity requirement of the safety-critical software. Finally a preliminary case study was given by using this framework to select the basic, conditional and optional SRMs from ISO/IEC 9126 for various software integrity levels.

Key words: Software integrity level,Software reliability metrics,Metrics selection framework