A Unified Scheme of Some Nonhomogenous Poisson Process Models for Software Reliability Estimation

In this paper, we describe how several existing software reliability growth models based on Nonhomogeneous Poisson processes (NHPPs) can be comprehensively derived by applying the concept of weighted arithmetic, weighted geometric, or weighted harmonic mean. Furthermore, based on these three weighted means, we thus propose a more general NHPP model from the quasi arithmetic viewpoint. In addition to the above three means, we formulate a more general transformation that includes a parametric family of power transformations. Under this general framework, we verify the existing NHPP models and derive several new NHPP models. We show that these approaches cover a number of well-known models under different conditions.