Extending failure modes and effects analysis approach for reliability analysis at the software architecture design level

Several reliability engineering approaches have been proposed to identify and recover from failures. A well-known and mature approach is the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) method that is usually utilized together with Fault Tree Analysis (FIFA) to analyze and diagnose the causes of failures. Unfortunately, both approaches seem to have primarily focused on failures of hardware components and less on software components. Moreover, for utilizing FMEA and FTA very often an existing implementation of the system is required to perform the reliability analysis. We propose extensions to FMEA and FTA to utilize them for the reliability analysis of software at the architecture design level. We present the software architecture reliability analysis approach (SARAH) that incorporates the extended FMEA and FTA. The approach is illustrated using an industrial case for analyzing reliability of the software architecture of a Digital TV.