Supporting Reliability Modeling and Analysis for Component-Based Software Architecture: An XML-Based Approach

Abstract

With recent development of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), the importance of predicting the non-functional properties, such as performance and reliability, has been widely acknowledged. A special problem in CBSE stems from its specific development process: Software components should be specified and implemented independently from their later context to enable reuse. Thus, non-functional properties of components need to be specified in the abstract level of architecture. In this paper, we explore the possibility of supporting reliability modeling and analysis for component-based software architecture simultaneously by an XML-based approach. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first we present an extension of xADL 3.0 that enables the support for reliability modeling of software architectures, based on this extension, we propose a method for generation of analysis-oriented models for reliability prediction. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by modeling an example and conducting reliability prediction.