Architecture-Based Assessment of Software Reliability

Abstract

With the growing advent of object-oriented and component-based software development paradigms, architecture-based software reliability analysis has emerged as an attractive alternative to the conventional black-box analysis based on software reliability growth models. The primary advantage of the architecture-based approach is that it explicitly relates the application reliability to component reliabilities, which eases the identification of components that are critical from a reliability perspective. Furthermore, these techniques can be used for an early assessment of the application reliability. These two features together can provide valuable information to practitioners and architects who design software applications, and managers who plan the allocation of resources to achieve the desired reliability targets in a cost effective manner.The objective of this tutorial is to discuss techniques to assess the reliability of a software application taking into consideration its architecture and the failure behavior of its components. The tutorial will also present how the architecture-based approach could be used to analyze the sensitivity of the application reliability to component and architectural parameters and to compute the importance measures of the application components. We will demonstrate the potential of the techniques presented in the tutorial through a case study of the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS).