Dependency characterization in path-based approaches to architecture-based software reliability prediction

Prevalent black-box based approaches to software reliability modeling are inappropriate to model the failure behavior of modern, component-based heterogeneous systems. Reliability prediction of applications taking into account their architecture is absolutely essential. The path-based approaches to architecture-based software reliability prediction rely on a fundamental assumption that the successive execution of the components is independent. This leads to very pessimistic estimates of software reliability. In this paper, we describe the dependency characterization which is a major bottleneck in the application of path-based approaches to real-life systems, and propose a way to resolve this issue based on time-dependent failure intensity