第三讲软件过程.pptVIP

Software Engineering 朱建凯 2009 Spring Critical Systems Dimensions of dependability Dependability costs Dependability costs tend to increase exponentially as increasing levels of dependability are required There are two reasons for this The use of more expensive development techniques and hardware that are required to achieve the higher levels of dependability The increased testing and system validation that is required to convince the system client that the required levels of dependability have been achieved Costs of increasing dependability Dependability economics Because of very high costs of dependability achievement, it may be more cost effective to accept untrustworthy systems and pay for failure costs However, this depends on social and political factors. A reputation for products that can’t be trusted may lose future business Depends on system type - for business systems in particular, modest levels of dependability may be adequate Availability and reliability Reliability The probability of failure-free system operation over a specified time in a given environment for a given purpose Availability The probability that a system, at a point in time, will be operational and able to deliver the requested services Both of these attributes can be expressed quantitatively Availability and reliability It is sometimes possible to subsume system availability under system reliability Obviously if a system is unavailable it is not delivering the specified system services However, it is possible to have systems with low reliability that must be available. So long as system failures can be repaired quickly and do not damage data, low reliability may not be a problem Availability takes repair time into account Reliability terminology Faults and failures Failures are a usually a result of system errors that are derived from faults in the system However, faults do not necessarily result in system errors The faulty system state may be transient and ‘corrected’ before an error