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Omer Farook is a member of the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology at Purdue University, Nothwest. Farook received the diploma of licentiate in mechanical engineering and B.S. M.E. in 1970 and 1972, respectively. He further received B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. in 1978 and 1983, respectively, from Illinois Institute of Technology. Farook's current interests are in the areas of embedded system design, hardware-software interfacing, digital communication, networking, image processing, and biometrics, C++, Python, PHP and Java languages. He has a keen interest in pedagogy and instruction delivery methods related to distance learning. He has a deep commitment to social justice and in achieving economic and educational equity.Dr. Jai P. Agrawal, Purdue University Northwest Jai P. Agrawal is a professor in electrical and computer engineering technology at Purdue University Northwest. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1991, dissertation in power electronics. He also received M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1970 and 1968, respectively The pedagogy of the course delivery is based on "Interactive Learning Model", utilizing the methodology of Outcome Based Education. Outcome Based Education's end result is the students' design projects performed at the end of the course. The course is conducted in a lab or studio like settings, that integrates both lecture and laboratory work in the same settings. The paper elaborates the benefits derived through the pedagogical approaches of keeping the learner actively engaged in all aspects of discovery and design. The course interactively involves the learner in directing and defining the material under discourse.Paper provides a road map and serves as pointer to host of design tools that are available that can be incorporated in a similar freshman course offering for Engineering Technology and Engineering programs. Paper provides the content details in terms of topics covered as well as all the labs performed during the course. The paper presents the details of pedagogical approach that was implemented in successful implementation of this course.

In this paper, we critically analyze the success of the traditional reliability models built to measure and estimate software reliability. We further propose that a Finite State Automata (FSA) based reliability model can serve as a befitting solution to all existing software reliability challenges. The proposed model estimates actual system reliability at runtime. The main advantage of this model is that it allows authentic or real-time reliability estimation, prediction and can also be trained towards dynamic learning of the evolving behavior of software, and fault tolerance.

In common parlance, the traditional software reliability estimation methods often rely on assumptions like statistical distributions that are often dubious and unrealistic. This paper analyzes the assumptions of traditional reliability estimation methods and further evaluates the practical viability of the predictions offered by these models in the current scenario. We further propose a novel Finite Automata (FA) based reliability model that implicitly scores over the traditional models on many factors, most importantly due to the fact that it is based on the realistic assumption that a software system in execution is a Finite State Machine (FSM). General TermsAutomata-Based Software, Software Reliability, Software Reliability Growth Model (SRGM).

is an assistant professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Technology Department of the Purdue University Northwest. He was a test engineer over 15 years, providing technical leadership in the certification, testing and evaluation of custom integrated security systems. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the City University of New York in 1992, specializing in control theory and electronic technology.