Supporting Reliability Modeling and Analysis for Component-Based Software Architecture: An XML-Based Approach

Abstract

With recent development of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), the importance of predicting the non-functional properties, such as performance and reliability, has been widely acknowledged. A special problem in CBSE stems from its specific development process: Software components should be specified and implemented independently from their later context to enable reuse. Thus, non-functional properties of components need to be specified in the abstract level of architecture. In this paper, we explore the possibility of supporting reliability modeling and analysis for componentbased software architecture simultaneously by an XML-based approach. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first we present an extension of xADL 3.0 that enables the support for reliability modeling of software architectures; based on this extension, we propose a method for generation of analysisoriented models for reliability prediction. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by modeling an example and conducting reliability prediction.