CAREER: Architecture-based Assessment of Software Reliability

摘要由于软件应用的复杂性日益增加，对这些应用所提供的服务的依赖性日益增加，而用于构建和维护这些应用的可用资源越来越少，因此应用的可靠性评估必须为经济有效的可靠性改进提供系统的、定量的指导。指南还必须考虑可靠性与其他属性（如性能、成本和努力）之间的相互作用，以在它们之间取得适当的平衡。基于体系结构的软件可靠性分析提供了提供考虑多个属性之间权衡的早期指导的潜力。该项目将透过以下发展，推动基于架构的软件可靠性分析：(i)考虑现实软件应用特性的建模技术，包括并发性、组件的确定性执行时间、接口故障、故障严重程度和架构风格；（ii）促进组件优先级和置信区间量化的分析技术；（iii）从不同软件工件确定模型参数的估计技术；（iv）优化技术，允许在性能、可靠性、成本和工作量之间进行双向和三向权衡。对已开发技术的评估和验证将基于对照实验和现实案例研究。研究结果将通过出版物传播，并将通过一个用户友好的工具加以实施，该工具将通过网络提供。一个全面的教育计划与该项目相结合。该计划包括：(i)研究生和本科课程的课程发展；（ii）短期课程和在会议、工业和研究机构发表的教程；（iii）国际教育访问；（iv）高中和初中学生及其教师的参与和参与；(v)代表性不足的群体和少数群体的参与。

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.