Coverage-based testing strategies and reliability modeling for fault-tolerant software systems

Software permeates our modern society, and its complexity and criticality is ever increasing. Thus the capability to tolerate software faults, particularly for critical applications, is evident. While fault-tolerant software is seen as a necessity, it also remains as a controversial technique and there is a lack of conclusive assessment about its effectiveness. This thesis aims at providing a quantitative assessment scheme for a comprehensive evaluation of fault-tolerant software including reliability model comparisons and trade-off studies with software testing techniques. First of all, we propose a comprehensive procedure in assessing fault-tolerant software for software reliability engineering, which is composed of four tasks: modeling, experimentation, evaluation and economics. Our ultimate objective is to construct a systematic approach to predicting the achievable reliability based on the software architecture and testing evidences, through an investigation of testing and modeling techniques for fault-tolerant software. Motivated by the lack of real-world project data for investigation on software testing and fault tolerance techniques together, we conduct a real-world