An Approach of Software Reliability Evaluation in the Open Environment

Abstract

Nowadays software environment has been more and more open than before,the openness of environment has greatly influenced many existing software development techniques,including software reliability evaluation.Due to the weakness in efficiency,methods based on testing or simulations are not competent in the open environment;other methods,such as the state-based methods,are more efficient,but are unable to deal with the systems with concurrency.So this paper tries to put forward an improved reliability evaluation method which can do better in both efficiency and applicability.This method first describes how to use Petri nets as software architecture description;and then introduces a bottom-up way to calculate the system's reliability,the calculation process can be done efficiently and accurately,and can also deal with systems with concurrency,which can hardly be handled by existing methods;the method can also generate information reflecting the component's importance to the whole system,which can make software reliability evaluation play a more important role in software development.