Several reliability engineering approaches have been proposed to identify and recover from failures. A well-known and mature
approach is the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) method that is usually utilized together with Fault Tree Analysis
(FTA) to analyze and diagnose the causes of failures. Unfortunately, both approaches seem to have primarily focused on failures
of hardware components and less on software components. Moreover, for utilizing FMEA and FTA very often an existing implementation
of the system is required to perform the reliability analysis. We propose extensions to FMEA and FTA to utilize them for the
reliability analysis of software at the architecture design level. We present the software architecture reliability analysis
approach (SARAH) that incorporates the extended FMEA and FTA. The approach is illustrated using an industrial case for analyzing
reliability of the software architecture of a Digital TV.
Keywords reliability analysis - FMEA - FTA - software architecture evaluation
This work has been carried out as part of the TRADER project under the responsibility of the Embedded Systems Institute. This
project is partially supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs under the Bsik program.