Reliability Perspective of Software Models: An Overview

The production engineers and system designers have been interested in computer-based system reliability and performance measurements due to a wide range of applications emerging both in the military and industrial world. Software failures can happen even with the best quality of computer-based systems due to a variety of failure mechanisms, resulting in major consequences such as human life loss, significant economic losses etc. There are numerous models worked out for measuring the reliability value of software assuming a wide variety of failure dependencies and compatibility issues. This investigation deals with software reliability and modelling steps for developing software models. We present several important factors, failure implications, system reliability computation procedure, as well as strategies implemented at the software reliability engineering level and quote recent developments of software models. Without software fault tolerance, it is practically impossible to build a totally fault tolerant system. Software fault tolerance is the capacity of software to recover and detect from a fault that is occurring or has already occurred. We explore some fault tolerant techniques that use protective redundancy at the software level to ensure the system reliability. A thorough examination of reliability modelling will be beneficial for both researchers and practitioners studying reliability assessment of software systems.