An Empirically Developed Fourier Series Model for Describing Software Failures

Abstract

In this paper, the authors draw attention to the fact the times between failures of a large software system, between any two program fixes, need not be independently and exponentially distributed, as has been often assumed in the past. It is argued that, in several instances, such times between failures occur in clusters, often systematically, and present some data to substantiate this claim. Then proposed is an empirically developed Fourier series model, which can provide an adequate description of our data, and which under certain circumstances can be used to predict future failures. Much of the analysis here is informal, and the key tool used to develop our approach is a spectrogram of the data.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 1983
Accession Number
ADA132739

Entities

People

  • Larry H. Crow
  • Nozer D. Singpurwalla

Organizations

  • United States Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Army Aviation
  • Clustering
  • Data Sets
  • Fourier Series
  • Frequency
  • Harmonics
  • Information Exchange
  • Information Science
  • Logistics Management
  • Observation
  • Sequences
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Statistical Tests
  • Systems Analysis
  • Time Intervals
  • Time Series Analysis

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Statistical inference.
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Theoretical Analysis.