Reliability Prediction for Component-Based Software Systems with Architectural-Level Fault Tolerance Mechanisms

Abstract

Reliability, one of the most important quality attributes of a software system, should be considered early in the development. Software fault tolerance mechanisms (FTMs) are often included in a software system to improve the system reliability. Their reliability impact highly depends on the application context. Existing reliability prediction approaches for component-based software systems either do not support modeling FTMs or have a limited expressiveness of FTMs. In this paper, we present a novel extension built upon the core model of a recent component-based reliability prediction approach to offer an explicit and flexible definition of reliability-relevant behavioral aspects (i.e. error detection and error handling) of FTMs, and an efficient evaluation of their reliability impact in the dependence of the whole system architecture and usage profile. Our approach is validated in two case studies, by modeling the reliability, conducting reliability predictions and sensitivity analyses, and demonstrating its ability to support design decisions.