Modeling the Failure Pathology of Software Components
João M. Franco, Frederico Cerveira, Raul Barbosa, Mário Alberto Zenha-Rela · 2016
Reliability prediction methods support early decision on software development by offering means for architects to reason and test their own designs. However, most of today's reliability prediction methods model the failure behavior as two states: functioning properly or failed, neglecting other failure modes. In addition, the lack of realistic case-studies and actual failure data make testing and validation difficult tasks. With this in mind, we propose a reliability modeling approach describing the behavior of a software component taking into account error occurrences and their associated impacts in terms of error masking, error propagation, error recovery and failures modes. To validate our approach we present a real case-study based on Xen where we injected faults at different virtualization layers. The experiments show close results between our modeling approach and the realistic values obtained from the experiment.