FAILURE PROCESS SIMULATION OF A COMPONENT-BASED SOFTWARE

In order to characterize as realistically as possible the evolution of software in time, the software reliability models should take into account the structure of the software. Such models are component-based models in which the software is not a black-box, but has several interconnected components. For this kind of soft-ware reliability models, due to their complexity, mathematical tractability becomes difficult to obtain. Therefore, thanks to its flexibility, simulation is a natural choice for analyzing the failure process and for estimating software reliability. Recently some software reliability models which take into consideration the modular structure of the software were described. In this paper we take as starting point a component based software reliability model, we describe a generalization of it and we use discrete-event simulation to analyze the software failure process.