Measuring Software Dependability by Robustness Benchmarking

Abstract

Inability to identify weaknesses or to quantify advancements in software system robustness frequently hinders the development of robust software systems. Efforts have been made to develop benchmarks of software robustness to address this problem, but they all suffer from significant shortcomings. This paper presents the various features that are desirable in a benchmark of system robustness, and evaluates some existing benchmarks according to these features. A new hierarchically structured approach to building robustness benchmarks. which overcomes many deficiencies of past efforts, is also presented. This approach has been applied to building a hierarchically structured benchmark that tests part of the Unix file and virtual memory systems. The resultant benchmark has successfully been used to identify new response class structures that were not detected in a similar situation by other less organized techniques.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA280053

Entities

People

  • Arup Mukherjee
  • Daniel P. Siewiorek

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Application Software
  • Classification
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Consistency
  • Language
  • Multithreading
  • Object Oriented Programming
  • Operating Systems
  • Random Number Generators
  • Reliability
  • Software Development
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Workload

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Systems Analysis and Design