Quality Analysis of Dependable Systems: A Developer Oriented Approach

The quality of dependable systems (DS) is characterized by a number of non-functional properties (e.g., performance, reliability, availability, etc.). Assessing the DS quality against these properties imposes the application of quality analysis and evaluation. Quality analysis consists of checking, analytically solving, or simulating models of the system, which are specified using formalisms like CSP, CCS, Markov-chains, Petri-nets, Queuing-nets, etc. However, developers are usually not keen on using such formalisms for modeling and evaluating DS quality. On the other hand, they are familiar with using architecture description languages and object-oriented notations for building DS models. Based on the previous and to render the use of traditional quality analysis techniques more tractable, this paper proposes an architecture-based environment that facilitates the specification and quality analysis of DS at the architectural level