In mission critical systems the operational success of the system depends on many aspects of the system’s operation such as availability, security, performance and safety. According to the design of the system, dependability attributes can be in conflict or in harmony often resulting in unavoidable trade-offs. Adopting a more flexible approach towards dependability allows us to achieve tolerabl...

On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems constitute the kernel of the information systems used today to support the daily operations of most organizations. Although these systems comprise the best examples of complex business-critical systems, no practical way has been proposed so far to characterize the impact of faults in such systems or to compare alternative solutions concerning depend...

A dependability case communicates an argument that a system will acceptably operate with respect to the stakeholders’ envisioned dependability requirements. We describe the use of the Goal Structuring Notation (an argumentation notation and methodology) for dependability case development to establish arguments supporting claims of achievement of the dependability requirements. At each stage of ...

Cloud computing is an evolving computing paradigm in which computing is provided to consumers upon request as a service and is charged on pay-as-you-go basis. The virtually infinite computing resources on the cloud provider side and the dramatic decrease of investment requirement on the consumer side have made large companies to consider outsourcing their IT services to cloud providers. But, la...

The goal of dependability benchmarking is to provide generic ways for characterizing the behaviour of components and computer systems in the presence of faults, allowing for the quantification of dependability measures. Beyond existing evaluation techniques, dependability benchmarking must provide a reproducible and cost-effective way of performing such a characterization, especially for compar...

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is an emerging discipline involving applications, mobile devices, middleware, and wireless networks. While most of existing e-commerce applications can be modified to run in a wireless environment, m-commerce also involves many more new applications that become possible only due to the wireless infrastructure. These applications include mobile financial services, us...

In service-oriented computing, services are built as an assembly of pre-existing, independently developed services. Hence, predicting their dependability is important to appropriately drive the selection and assembly of services, to get some required dependability level. We present an approach to the dependability prediction of such services, exploiting ideas from the Software Architectureand c...