Sensitivity of System Reliability to Usage Profile Changes

Usage profiles and component reliability are two important factors in software system reliability estimation. To assess the sensitivity of a system’s reliability to the usage profile and to the reliability of its components, a Markov based sys-tem model is used. With the help of this model, the maxi-mum sensitivity to one change or the statistical sensitivity to many independent changes can be estimated. Advantages and limitations to this approach are discussed and finally the theory is applied to an example to show its validity