UML Support for Reliability Evaluation

Today’s software systems are developed and targeted for satisfying sometimes very critical functions. Reliability is considered to be one of the most important nonfunctional quality attribute of such software systems. The aim of reliability estimation in early stages of software development process – analysis and design – should reduce the future costs for possible failure repairing through increasing the reliability before the construction of the software system. Because, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) becomes the standard for software system’s specification, the last works done in architecture based reliability estimation and assessment use UML as the base for software architecture specification. In this paper, we discuss the existing approaches with critical overview and outline the directions for future research.