We depend on software everyday in our professional and personal lives and people depend on the software we produce. By “depend” I mean that some essential activity could not be successful if the necessary software failed to perform. In this issue of Strategic Software Engineering, I will explore the importance of dependability to the strategic goals of the organization. I will consider a framew...

Software architecture plays an increasingly important role in the dependability of today’s large and complex software systems. Formal and informal architectural models embody critical design decisions about systems’ functional and nonfunctional properties. Traditionally, a wide range of software architecture modeling and analysis approaches focused on validating systems’ functionality. More rec...

For efficiency reasons, system designers’ will is to use an integrated set of methods and tools to describe specifications, and also to perform dependability analyses. AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language) has proved its capacity for architectural modeling. This paper presents a modeling framework allowing the generation of dependability-oriented analytical models from AADL models, t...

Society is increasingly requiring quantitative assessment of risk and associated dependability cases. Informally, a dependability case comprises some reasoning, based on assumptions and evidence, that supports a dependability claim at a particular level of confidence. In this paper we argue that a quantitative assessment of claim confidence is necessary for proper assessment of risk. We discuss...

Web services (WS) — the most prominent technology for realizing service oriented architectures — are broadly pushed by vendors and are likely to be deployed in dependability demanding areas such as air traffic control, health care, or transportation in the near future. However, although a plethora of WS standards exists, only few of them address dependability, namely specifications for transact...

Sixth-generation communication networks must be highly dependable due to the foreseen connectivity of critical infrastructures through them. Dependability is a compound metric four well-known concepts—reliability, availability, safety, and security. Each these concepts have unique consequences for success 6G technologies applications. Using concepts, we explore dependability in this article. Du...