ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to describe a reliability and availability analysis methodology for a continuously running, concurrent application. We propose a state space approach to represent the architecture of a concurrent application, which is then mapped to an irreducible discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) to obtain architectural statistics. We discuss how the application architecture can be extracted from profile data to facilitate the use of our methodology to analyze the reliability of practical software applications. We illustrate the methodology using a case study of a MRSS news ticker application. The state space explosion issue which may arise in the practical application of the methodology is then discussed and methods to alleviate the issue are suggested. To the best of our knowledge, this research is one of the first steps in pushing the state of the art in architecture based software reliability analysis from sequential to concurrent software applications.
