Fault Diversity in Software Reliability
Philip J. Boland, Frank Proschan, Y. L. Tong · Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences · 1987
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.