Early prediction of software component reliability

Abstract

The ability to predict the reliability of a software system early in its development, e.g., during architectural design, can help to improve the system's quality in a cost-effective manner. Existing architecture-level reliability prediction approaches focus on system-level reliability and assume that the reliabilities of individual components are known. In general, this assumption is unreasonable, making component reliability prediction an important missing ingredient in the current literature. Early prediction of component reliability is a challenging problem because of many uncertainties associated with components under development. In this paper we address these challenges in developing a software component reliability prediction framework. We do this by exploiting architectural models and associated analysis techniques, stochastic modeling approaches, and information sources available early in the development lifecycle. We extensively evaluate our framework to illustrate its utility as an early reliability prediction approach.