Application of Design Combinatorial Theory to Scenario-Based Software Architecture Analysis

Design combinatorial theory for test-case generation has been used successfully in the past. It is useful in optimizing test cases as it is practically impossible to exhaustively test any software system. The same concept can be applied while doing high level architecture analysis of a software system. In software architecture analysis, the architect often analyzes different scenarios that a system may experience during its lifecycle to ensure that all or most possible scenarios are covered in the design. Usually, the analysis is conducted manually in an ad-hoc fashion and scenarios are executed separately. However, some important use cases that involve multiple concurrent scenarios may be overlooked with this approach. Software architecture analysis is critical, especially for real time telecommunications systems. More formalis m or robustness needs to be considered in the evaluation process, particularly for reliability. This paper demonstrates application of the design combinatorial theory based technique and tool to software architecture reliability analysis of a practical real-time software system.