Improving the N-version programming process through the evolution of a design paradigm

The application of the N-version programming (NVP) technique in a project that reused the revised specification of a real, automatic airplane landing problem. The study involved 40 students, who formed 15 independent programming teams to design, program, test, and evaluate the application. The impact of the paradigm on the software development process, the improvement of the resulting N-version software (NVS) product, the insight, experience, and learning in conducting this project, various testing procedures applied to the program versions, several quantitative measures of the resulting NVS product, and some comparisons with previous projects are discussed. The effectiveness of the revised NVP design paradigm in improving software reliability by providing fault tolerance is demonstrated