Dependability Modeling and Assessment in UML-Based Software Development

Assessment of software nonfunctional properties (NFP) is an important problem in software development. In the context of model-driven development, an emerging approach for the analysis of different NFPs consists of the following steps: (a) to extend the software models with annotations describing the NFP of interest; (b) to transform automatically the annotated software model to the formalism chosen for NFP analysis; (c) to analyze the formal model using existing solvers; (d) to assess the software based on the results and give feedback to designers. Such a modeling→analysis→assessment approach can be applied to any software modeling language, be it general purpose or domain specific. In this paper, we focus on UML-based development and on the dependability NFP, which encompasses reliability, availability, safety, integrity, and maintainability. The paper presents the profile used to extend UML with dependability information, the model transformation to generate a DSPN formal model, and the assessment of the system properties based on the DSPN results.