A Large-Scale Industrial Case Study on Architecture-Based Software Reliability Analysis

Architecture-based software reliability analysis methods shall help software architects to identify critical software components and to quantify their influence on the system reliability. Although researchers have proposed more than 20 methods in this area, empirical case studies applying these methods on large-scale industrial systems are rare. The costs and benefits of these methods remain unknown. On this behalf, we have applied the Cheung method on the software architecture of an industrial control system from ABB consisting of more than 100 components organized in nine subsystems with more than three million lines of code. We used the Littlewood/Verrall model to estimate subsystems failure rates and logging data to derive subsystem transition probabilities. We constructed a discrete time Markov chain as an architectural model and conducted a sensitivity analysis. This paper summarizes our experiences and lessons learned. We found that architecture-based software reliability analysis is still difficult to apply and that more effective data collection techniques are required.