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Electronics
Special Issues
Software Reliability: Status and Perspectives
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Software Reliability: Status and Perspectives

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 6222

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Junjun Zheng

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan
Interests: software reliability; dependable computing; performance evaluation; computer security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Tadashi Dohi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Graduate School of Engineering, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
Interests: dependable computing; software reliability; performance evaluation; reliability analysis; operations research; maintenance model; stochastic model
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Hiroyuki Okamura

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University, Higashihiroshima, Japan
Interests: reliability engineering; software reliability; stochastic model; performance analysis; operations research

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Software reliability has attracted an increasing amount of attention from the academic society and industrial communities in recent decades, especially against the background of the Industry 4.0 era, where software systems become more and more complex and are playing an increasingly important role in both the industrial world and our daily lives—for example, cyberphysical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) systems, real-time systems, and machine learning-based systems. The failures or requirement violations of these systems may lead to disruptive or even catastrophic consequences, such as significant economic damage or the loss of human lives. Therefore, it is essential to maintain software reliability in the face of faults and failures, and as a result, the topic of software reliability has been extensively studied in recent decades. Nevertheless, software reliability keeps posing challenging research questions due to the complexity, heterogeneity, and distributivity of software systems.

The Special Issue aims to concentrate contributions from academic and industrial communities addressing reliability issues of software applications, reviewing the status of software reliability and discussing advanced methods and tools for assessing, predicting, and enhancing the reliability of software systems.

Dr. Junjun Zheng
Prof. Dr. Tadashi Dohi
Prof. Dr. Hiroyuki Okamura
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • software reliability
  • reliability assessment
  • reliability prediction
  • fault tolerance
  • software testing, verification, and validation
  • modeling and analysis

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 962 KiB  
Article
MFF-IoT: A Multi-Granularity Formal Framework of User Authentication for IoT
by Yuan Fei, Jiaqi Yin and Lijun Yan
Electronics 2023, 12(11), 2356; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12112356 - 23 May 2023
Viewed by 915
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) generates vast amounts of data from numerous applications. However, since wireless channels are the primary means of communication, IoT networks are vulnerable to several security threats, which can compromise their security and privacy. To address these issues, various [...] Read more.
The Internet of Things (IoT) generates vast amounts of data from numerous applications. However, since wireless channels are the primary means of communication, IoT networks are vulnerable to several security threats, which can compromise their security and privacy. To address these issues, various user authentication protocols have been proposed. Thus, it is still a challenge to provide multi-granularity verifications for different authentications of the IoT. In this paper, we propose a multi-granularity formal framework of user authentication for the IoT (MFF-IoT). Our framework builds different formal models (specification language HLPSL models, process algebra CSP models, Timed CSP models, and timed automata) to complete multi-granularity formal verification. By using both coarse-grained and fine-grained modeling, we can balance the tradeoff between model complexity and verification accuracy. Specifically, our fine-grained models provide a more detailed representation of the framework’s behavior and enable us to perform timing-related probability analysis. As these formal models can be implemented by model-checking tools (AVISPA, PAT with C#, and UPPAAL), important properties and features can be analyzed and verified. We also propose several algorithms for better formal model building and evaluate our framework with a case study to show its practicality and effectiveness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Reliability: Status and Perspectives)
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18 pages, 708 KiB  
Article
A Checkpointing Recovery Approach for Soft Errors Based on Detector Locations
by Na Yang and Yun Wang
Electronics 2023, 12(4), 805; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12040805 - 06 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1049
Abstract
Soft errors are transient errors caused by single-event effects (SEEs) resulting from a strike by high-energy particles acting on sensitive areas of integrated circuits. Soft errors frequently occur in the space environment, adversely affecting the reliability of aerospace-based computing. A recovery process is [...] Read more.
Soft errors are transient errors caused by single-event effects (SEEs) resulting from a strike by high-energy particles acting on sensitive areas of integrated circuits. Soft errors frequently occur in the space environment, adversely affecting the reliability of aerospace-based computing. A recovery process is launched to recover the program when soft errors are detected. A periodic checkpointing recovery approach is widely utilized to prevent soft errors. However, this approach does not consider the detector locations, resulting in a large time overhead. This paper proposes a checkpointing recovery approach for soft errors based on detector locations called DLCKPT. DLCKPT reduces the time overhead by considering detector locations. The experimental results show that the percentage decrease in the time overhead between the DLCKPT and the periodic checkpointing recovery approach is 13.4%. The average recovery rate and average space overhead are 99.3% and 44.4% for the periodic checkpointing recovery approach and 99.4% and 34.6% for the DLCKPT. These results show that the DLCKPT and the periodic checkpointing recovery approach produce comparable results for the recovery rate. The DLCKPT has a lower time overhead and a slightly lower space overhead than the periodic checkpointing recovery approach, demonstrating its effectiveness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Reliability: Status and Perspectives)
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11 pages, 659 KiB  
Article
Collaborative Crowdsourced Software Testing
by Sultan Alyahya
Electronics 2022, 11(20), 3340; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11203340 - 17 Oct 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1457
Abstract
Crowdsourced software testing (CST) uses a crowd of testers to conduct software testing. Currently, the microtasking model is used in CST; in it, a testing task is sent to individual testers who work separately from each other. Several studies mentioned that the quality [...] Read more.
Crowdsourced software testing (CST) uses a crowd of testers to conduct software testing. Currently, the microtasking model is used in CST; in it, a testing task is sent to individual testers who work separately from each other. Several studies mentioned that the quality of test reports produced by individuals was a drawback because a large number of invalid defects were submitted. Additionally, individual workers tended to catch the simple defects, not those with high complexity. This research explored the effect of having pairs of collaborating testers working together to produce one final test report. We conducted an experiment with 75 workers to measure the effect of this approach in terms of (1) the total number of unique valid defects detected, (2) the total number of invalid defects reported, and (3) the possibility of detecting more difficult defects. The findings show that testers who worked in collaborating pairs can be as effective in detecting defects as an individual worker; the differences between them are marginal. However, CST significantly affects the quality of test reports submitted in two dimensions: it helps reduce the number of invalid defects and also helps detect more difficult defects. The findings are promising and suggest that CST platforms can benefit from new mechanisms that allow for the formation of teams of two individuals who can participate in doing testing jobs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Reliability: Status and Perspectives)
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17 pages, 417 KiB  
Article
Karnaugh-Veitch Maps as Minimal Formal Contract between Textual Requirements and Tests: A Use-Case Based Technical Analysis
by Nils Henning Müllner
Electronics 2022, 11(15), 2430; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11152430 - 04 Aug 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1517
Abstract
Checking that requirements written in natural language hold for a formally implemented system is a complex task. Test steps are commonly implemented manually from the requirements. This process is inherently prone to mistakes, as test cases are complex and need to be analyzed [...] Read more.
Checking that requirements written in natural language hold for a formally implemented system is a complex task. Test steps are commonly implemented manually from the requirements. This process is inherently prone to mistakes, as test cases are complex and need to be analyzed sequentially to check which input/output combinations are tested (although tools allow for explicit tracing). Utilizing Karnaugh–Veitch maps as minimal formal contract between informal requirements and implemented test steps improves this process. KV-maps provide the requirements in a computer-editable way, as they correspond to Boolean formulas. KV-maps further allow to define which test steps are relevant. With both requirements and relevance specification at hand, test steps are automatically generated. The approach is applied on a real-world industrial use-case—a train control management system. Although being generally amenable to permutation testing, the selected use-case emphasizes the potential of the method. The method successfully demonstrates its benefits and may help to disclose flaws in the current manually implemented tests. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Reliability: Status and Perspectives)
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