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Fault Diversity in Software Reliability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

Philip J. boland ,
Frank proschan  and
Y. L. Tong
Philip J. boland
Affiliation:
Department of Statistics University College, Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
Frank proschan
Affiliation:
Department of StatisticsThe Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306
Y. L. Tong
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30332
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Abstract

Diversity of bugs or faults in a software system is a factor contributing to software unreliability which has not yet been appropriately emphasized. This paper is written with the intention of demonstrating the impact of fault diversity on the time to detection of software bugs. A new discrete software reliability model based on the multinomial distribution is introduced. It is shown that for models of this type, the more diverse the fault probabilities are, the longer (stochastically) it takes to detect or eliminate any n faults, while the smaller (stochastically) will be the number of faults detected or eliminated during a given amount of time (or during a given number of inputs to the system). The impact of fault diversity is also demonstrated for the Jelinski–Moranda model.

Type
Articles
Information
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , April 1987 , pp. 175 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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