Consider of fault propagation in architecture-based software reliability analysis

Software reliability models are used to estimation and prediction of software reliability. Existing models either use black-box approach that based on test data during software test phase or white-box approach that based on software architecture and individual component reliability, which is more suited to assess the reliability of modern software system. However, most of the reliability models based on architecture assumed that a failure occurring within one component will not cause any other component to fail, which is inconsistent with the facts. This paper introduces a reliability model and a reliability analysis technique for architecture-based reliability evaluation. Our approach extend existing reliability model by considering fault propagation. We believe that this model can be used to effectively improve software quality.