The DOI matches its Crossref record.
An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming
Abstract
N-version programming has been proposed as a method of incorporating fault tolerance into software. Multiple versions of a program (i.e. `N') are prepared and executed in parallel. Their outputs are collected and examined by a voter, and, if they are not identical, it is assumed that the majority is correct. This method depends for its reliability improvement on the assumption that programs that have been developed independently will fail independently. An experiment is described in which the fundamental axiom is tested. In all, 27 versions of a program were prepared independently from the same specification at two universities and then subjected to one million tests. The results of the tests revealed that the programs were individually extremely reliable but that the number of tests in which more than one program failed was substantially more than expected. The results of these tests are presented along with an analysis of some of the faults that were found in the programs. Background information on the programmers used is also summarized.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers
Yang, X., Chen, Y., Eide, E., & Regehr, J. (2011) · Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation · doi:10.1145/1993498.1993532 · Cited by 825
Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers
Yang, X., Chen, Y., Eide, E., & Regehr, J. (2011) · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · doi:10.1145/1993316.1993532 · Cited by 586
The infeasibility of quantifying the reliability of life-critical real-time software
Butler, R. W., & Finelli, G. B. (1993) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/32.210303 · Cited by 398
A Theoretical Basis for the Analysis of Multiversion Software Subject to Coincident Errors
Eckhardt, D. E., & Lee, L. D. (1985) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.1985.231895 · Cited by 337
Evaluation of safety-critical software
Parnas, D. L., van Schouwen, A. J., & Kwan, S. P. (1990) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/78973.78974 · Cited by 333
Metadata
- Authors
- Knight, J. C., & Leveson, N. G.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 1986-01
- Volume
- SE-12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 96-109
- ISSN
- 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1971991620
- Cited by
- 774
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 55.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/tse.1986.6312924
- The paper
- Knight, J. C., & Leveson, N. G. (1986). An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.1986.6312924
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
