CAREER: Architecture-based Assessment of Software Reliability

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AbstractDue to the growing complexity of software applications, increasing dependence on the services offered by these applications, and decreasing resources available to build and maintain them, reliability assessment of an application must provide systematic, quantitative guidance for cost-effective reliability improvement. The guidance must also consider the interplay of reliability with other attributes such as performance, cost, and effort to strike the right balance between them. Architecture-based software reliability analysis offers the potential to provide such early guidance considering the tradeoffs among multiple attributes. The project will enable advances in architecture-based software reliability analysis through the development of: (i) modeling techniques to consider the characteristics of real-life software applications including concurrency, deterministic execution times of components, interface failures, failure severities, and architecture styles, (ii) analysis techniques to facilitate component prioritization and quantification of confidence intervals, (iii) estimation techniques to determine model parameters from different software artifacts, and (iv) optimization techniques to allow two-way and three-way tradeoffs between performance, reliability, cost, and effort. Evaluation and validation of the developed techniques will be based both on controlled experiments and real-life case studies. The outcomes of the research will be disseminated via publications and will be implemented in a user-friendly tool which will be made available via the Web. A comprehensive education plan is integrated with the project. The plan comprises: (i) curriculum development of graduate and undergraduate courses, (ii) short courses and tutorials for presentation at conferences and industrial and research institutions, (iii) international educational visits, (iv) involvement and participation of high school and middle school students and their teachers, and (v) involvement of underrepresented groups and minorities.