SOFTWARE RELIABILITY GROWTH AND INNOVATION DIFFUSION MODELS: AN INTERFACE
P. K. Kapur, Ompal Singh, Rubina Mittal · International Journal of Reliability Quality and Safety Engineering · 2004
The objective of this paper is to show an interface between modelling, allocation problems and control problems in software reliability and marketing. It has been brought out that in models which exist in software reliability and defined implicitly/explicitly for errors of two types; it is the dependency factor among errors that gives rise to S-Shaped growth curve. It is further shown that this dependency on the line of categorization of errors, adopters can be of several types/categories. Such categorization, though implicit in nature, not brought out in literature, further strengthens the fact that modeling any software phenomenon should incorporate errors of different severity rather explicitly. We have also provided a general model which can account for imperfect debugging and error generation in software reliability. The approach followed is rather implicit in nature but provides good closed form solutions. Such solutions were being alternatively looked for in innovation diffusion models namely the Bass Model, which can account for repeat purchase and growing market size. Besides we also show how problem of resource allocation and control in the two fields can be analyzed similarly. The analogy as brought out in this paper is interesting and may further lead to enriching the two areas of current research.