Architecture-based Assessment of Software Reliability

  Lecturer(s)

  :

Swapna S. Gokhale

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Univ. of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269

Swapna S. Gokhale is an Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut.Research Interests are in :Converged IP/PSTN networks, Wireless networks, Software architecture, Software testing and reliability, Software maintenance, Program comprehension, and Performance and reliability evaluation of computer networks and systems.

Veena B.Mendiratta

Bell Laboratories
Alcatel-Lucent
1960 Lucent Lane
Naperville, IL 60566

Veena Mendiratta is a Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies in Naperville, Illinois. Her work is focused on the reliability and performance analysis for telecommunications systems products, networks and services to guide system architecture solutions. Her technical interests include architecture, reliability and survivability, fault tolerant computing and software reliability engineering. Recent work has also included architecting survivable telecommunications systems.

Professional activities include: Advisory Board member and Judge at the annual COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling for undergraduates; membership in INFORMS and IEEE; and Program Committee member for ISSRE, PDS and ISAS.

Description

 :

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).