HARDWARE VERSUS SOFTWARE

RELIABILITY
• Failure does not occur if the software is not used.
However in hardware reliability, material
deterioration can cause failure even when the
system is not in use.

• In software reliability, failures are caused by

incorrect logic, incorrect statements, or incorrect
input data. In hardware reliability, failures are
caused by material deterioration, random failures,
design errors, misuse, and environmental factors.
 HARDWARE VERSUS SOFTWARE
RELIABILITY
• Software failures are rarely preceded by warnings
while hardware failures are usually preceded by
warnings.

• Software reliability tends to change continually

during test periods. While hardware reliability may
change during certain periods such as initial burn in
or the end of useful life however it has a much
greater tendency then software value.
HARDWARE RELIABILITY GRAPH

The Bathtub Curve

SOFTWARE RELIABILITY GRAPH
 RELIABILITY METRICS

• Reliability metrics are used to quantitatively express the

reliability of the software product.

• Measuring the software reliability is a difficult problem

because we don't have a good understanding about
the nature of software. It is difficult to find a suitable way
to measure software reliability, and most of the aspects
related to software reliability.

• Some reliability metrics which can be used to quantify

the reliability of the software product are discussed in
next slide.
 MEAN TIME TO FAILURE (MTTF)

• MTTF is defined as the time interval between the

successive failures. An MTTF of 200 means that one
failure can be expected every 200 time units.
• The time units are totally dependent on the system
& it can even be specified in the number of
transactions.
• MTTF is relevant for systems with long transactions.
For example, it is suitable for computeraided design
systems where a designer will work on a design for
several hours as well as for Word-processor systems.
 MEAN TIME TO REPAIR (MTTR)

• Once the failure occur sometime is required to fix

the error.

• MTTR measures the average time it takes to track

the errors causing the failure & to fix them.
MEAN TIME BETWEEN FAILURE (MTBF)

• We can combine MTTF &MTTR metrics to get the

MTBF metric.

• MTBF = MTTF + MTTR

• Thus, an MTBF of 300 indicates that once the failure

occurs, the next failure is expected to occur only
after 300 hours. In this case the time measurements
are real time & not the execution time as in MTTF.
 RATE OF OCCURRENCE OF FAILURE
(ROCOF)
• It is the number of failures occurring in unit time
interval.The number of unexpected events over a
particular time of operation.

• ROCOF is the frequency of occurrence with which

unexpected behavior is likely to occur.

• An ROCOF of 0.02 means that two failures are likely

to occur in each 100 operational time unit steps. It is
also called failure intensity metric.
PROBABILITY OF FAILURE ON DEMAND
(POFOD)
• POFOD is defined as the probability that the system
will fail when a service is requested. It is the number
of system failures given a number of systems inputs.

• POFOD is the likelihood that the system will fail when

a service request is made. A POFOD of 0.1 means
that one out of a ten service requests may result in
failure.

• POFOD is an important measure for safety critical

systems. POFOD is appropriate for protection
systems where services are demanded occasionally
 AVAILABILITY (AVAIL)

• Availability is the probability that the system is

available for use at a given time.

• It takes into account the repair time & the restart

time for the system.

• An availability of 0.995 means that in every 1000

time units, the system is likely to be available for 995
of these.
 CLASSIFICATION OF FAILURES

• Transient :Transient failures occur only for certain

input values while invoking a function.It is a
temporary error that is likely to disappear soon.

• Permanent:Permanent failures occur for all input

values while invoking a function of the system.

• Recoverable:When a recoverable failure occurs,the

system can recover without having to shutdown
and restart the system(with or without opertor
intervention).
 CLASSIFICATION OF FAILURES

• Unrecoverable:In this,the system may need to be

restarted.

• Cosmetic:These classes of failure cause only minor

irritations and don’t lead to incorrect results.
Example-A situation where mouse button has to be
clicked twice instead of once to invoke a given
function through the graphical user interface.