Structure-based software reliability prediction*

Prevalent approaches to software reliability modeling are black-box based, i.e., the the software system is considered as a whole and only its interactions with the outside world are modeled without looking into its internal structure. However, with the advancement and widespread use of object oriented systems design and development, the use of component-based software development is on the rise. Software systems are developed in a heterogeneous (multiple teams in different environments) fashion, and hence it may be inappropriate to model the overall failure process of such systems using only one of the several software reliability growth models. In this paper we outline the constituents of the structural models. We then present a exhaustive analyses of the classes of methods where the architecture of the application is modeled either as a discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) or a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC), and illustrate these methods using examples. 1 Introduction The impac...