Minimum Spanning Tree-Based Approach for Reliability Estimation of COTS-Based Software Applications

Software reliability is defined as the probability of the failure-free operation of a software system for a specified period of time in a specified environment. Traditional approaches for software reliability analysis treat the software as a whole, use test data during software test phase and model only the interactions with outside world; these are known as black box models. Day-by-day the complexity of software application is growing and there is more emphasis on reuse. So, Component-Based Software (CBS) applications have come into existence. The black box models ignore the structure of the software made out of components and reliability of individual components, and thus are not appropriate to model the CBS. This has generated the research interest of architecture-based reliability. This paper introduces a reliability model and reliability analysis technique for architecture-based reliability evaluation