Reliability evaluation of software architectural styles based on correlated component failure

This study aims to provide an e cient and scalable approach to evaluate the reliability of di erent software architectural styles concerning correlated components failures. To do so, a method based on the Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) model is proposed. In the proposed method, software architectural styles are used for reliability evaluation. The four main styles are transformed into Markov chain models and the transfer matrix is established for them; then, by using the Bernoulli distribution, the correlation between components is shown in the matrix and used in the evaluation process. The proposed method is scalable so that it can be used for large software architectures with heterogeneous and homogeneous styles. The evaluation results for the case study demonstrate that this method enjoys greater accuracy than other methods for the prediction of reliability of the software architectures. It is concluded that the proposed method is viable enough for a preliminary estimation of the software architecture reliability and can make a better comparison among various architectural styles to choose the most suitable one from the available options.