Description: Computer systems, whether hardware or software, are subject to failure. Precisely, what is a failure? It is defined as: The inability of a system or system component to perform a required function within specified limits. Afailure may be produced when a fault is encountered and a loss of the expected service to the user results [IEEE/AIAA P1633]. This brings us to the question of w...

This paper presents the relation between software metrics and maintainability and the metrics which characterise the ease of the maintenance process when applied to a specific product. The criteria of maintainability and the methods through which these criteria are understood and interpreted by software programmers are analysed. Surveys and examples that show whether software metrics and mainta...

A large number of software products enter the maintenance phase due to the growing application of information systems. Software maintenance is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults and improve its overall performance and quality. Easily maintainable software saves large costs and effort involved in developing the software. Hence maintainability assessment is an...

The problem of characterizing response variability and assessing reliability of vibrating skeletal structures made up of randomly inhomogeneous, curved/straight Timoshenko beams is considered. The excitation is taken to be random in nature. A frequency-domain stochastic "nite element method is developed in terms of dynamic sti!ness coe$cients of the constituent stochastic beam elements. The dis...

Reliability importance measures providing information about the importance of components on the system performance (reliability, maintainability, safety, or any performance metrics of interest) have been widely used in reliability studies and risk analysis. In this paper, the differential importance measure (DIM) introduced recently for use in risk-informed decision-making is extended to Markov...

The advent of reconfigurable hardware as a computing medium creates a multi-dimensional design space where trade-offs between power, speed, cost, and reliability are now possible. Dynamic reconfiguration allows these trade-offs to be made on-line to adapt to various environmental changes. Furthermore, the cost of designing reliable circuits is greatly reduced since varying levels of reliability...