UML based statistical testing acceleration of distributed safety-critical software

Abstract

It is necessary to assess the reliability of distributed safety-critical systems to a high degree of confidence before they are deployed in the field. However, distributed safety-critical software systems often include some rarely executed critical functions that are often inadequately tested in statistical testing based reliability estimation. This paper presents a method that can accelerate statistical testing of distributed safety-critical software. The method starts with the derivation of scenario usage diagram model (SUD) from UML diagrams annotated with usage related attributes and reliability attributes. Then the statistical testing accelerating method based on importance sampling is presented. When both the critical scenarios and the entire software are adequately tested, the method can still compute the unbiased software reliability from the test results with much less test cases. Thus, the statistical testing cost of distributed safety-critical software can be reduced effectively. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.