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In the current scenario, component-based system development approaches have led to reuse based development and espousal of large-scale software systems.To analyze the design of such systems and assess its performance is not a trivial task. Model-based testing tools have maturely signified the success of functional testing of such systems. An urge to spawn the testing of non-functional behavior from development models is further expected. Reliability assessment is one such aspect. However, the design models have not been employed in the prevailing nonfunctional assessment techniques. Assuming the strength of such models and the need to devise assessment measures, an attempt to formalize architectural models to this context is presented in the paper. Our paper focuses on deriving an intermediate notation for non-functional evaluation of the software systems. The concept of modeling, annotating constraints and making a visual of component interaction patterns is the scope of the work. The new model thus generated has features similar to the System's Engineering "Functional Flow Diagram" and will be used with same definitions for the software components.

Model based development and testing techniques have ventured diverse research directions to assure quality of the software product. Models developed during architecture and design phases are efficient tools to assess quality at an early development stage. However, testing the extra-functional or non-functional properties of software systems is not frequently practised eg. reliability. The motivation to our work is to model the context of execution which is significant in system reliability analysis. In this paper we visualize the components of complex software systems and their interactions in the form of Functional Flow Diagram (FFD). This notation specifies the dynamic aspect of system behavior as the context of execution. To further asses reliability, the FFD is translated into Reliability Block Diagram (RBD). The relative importance of the components in terms of reliability is evaluated and is associated with prioritization of the component. The model is simple but significant for system maintenance, improvisation and modification. This model supports analysis and testing through better understanding of the interacting components and their reliabilities.

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