Accelerated Degradation Tests Applied to Software Aging Experiments

Abstract--In the past ten years, the software aging phenomenon has been systematically researched, and recognized by both academic, and industry communities as an important obstacle to achieving dependable software systems. One of its main effects is the depletion of operating system resources, causing system performance degradation or crash/hang failures in running applications. When conducting experimental studies to evaluate the operational reliability of systems suffering from software aging, long periods of runtime are required to observe system failures. Focusing on this problem, we present a systematic approach to accelerate the software aging manifestation to reduce the experimentation time, and to estimate the lifetime distribution of the investigated system. First, we introduce the concept of "aging factor" that offers a fine control of the aging effects at the experimental level. The aging factors are estimated via sensitivity analyses based on the statistical desi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TR
• Authors: Rivalino Matias, Pedro Alberto Barbetta, Kishor S. Trivedi, Paulo José de Freitas Filho
• Keywords: Hardware, Lifetime Distribution, Software Aging, Software Aging Phenomenon, TR 2010