| Component based development is gaining popularity in the software engineering community. The reliability of components affects the reliability of the system. Different models and theories have been developed to estimate system reliability given the information about system architecture and the quality of the components. Almost always in these models, one of the key attributes of component-based systems, the error propagation between the components, is overlooked or not taken into account in reliability calculation.; This thesis extends previous work on the Bayesian approach to reliability estimation and assessment of component-based systems by introducing the Error Propagation Probability into the model. The thesis demonstrates the impact of the error propagation analytically and in a case study of an automated Personnel Access Control System. The analysis showed that the error propagation has a significant impact on system reliability prediction and, therefore, future architecture-based models should not ignore it. |
