Title : Experience Report : Evaluation of Holistic Fault Tolerance

Software maintenance is a crucial phase of the software development life cycle. It is important to facilitate this stage, complying with both functional and non-functional requirements. However, very often the main focus is made on the functional features of the application, whereas fault tolerance mechanisms are neglected and as a result do not provide sufficient maintainability and reusability. In our previous work we introduced the concept of Holistic Fault Tolerance as a novel crosscutting approach to the design and implementation of fault tolerance mechanisms for developing reliable software applications that meet non-functional requirements, such as performance and resource utilisation. This paper evaluates the maintainability of the Holistic Fault Tolerance architecture using experimental analysis of the developer's effort required to implement various modifications of the fault tolerance functionality. The paper starts by justifying the choice of modifications and evaluation techniques. Then the aspect-oriented implementation we proposed for Holistic Fault Tolerance is evaluated by conducting its experimental comparison with a standard objectoriented fault tolerance implementation. The evaluation shows that the implementation with Holistic Fault Tolerance makes fault tolerance mechanisms easier to maintain and ensures higher modularity of the source code. © 2017 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical Details