A new software failure analysis method based on the system reliability modeling

摘要

Reliability is one of the most important factors of the software quality. Thus, it should identify and analyze the software failure more adequately in the early stage of software development. However, the traditional reliability analysis approaches are not very suitable for the airborne support system software which has many complex failures such as the control conflict between software and hardware, the unanticipated operations, and the abnormal input data and so on. To solve this problem, we propose a new software failure analysis method based on the system reliability modeling with the System-Theoretic Accident Modeling and Processes (STAMP). First, the STAMP-based analysis framework is proposed according to the characters of the airborne support system software. Based on the framework, the reliability-related constraints and the control model are illustrated. Furthermore, the reliability analysis method is proposed to identify the inadequate or abnormal control actions as well as their causes. Finally, the experimental results show that compared with the existing methods, this new approach can expose the reliability problems of the airborne support system software more adequately and effectively..