Integrating the Approach of Adjustable Reliability into the System Development Life Cycle

Fault-tolerant distributed systems are implemented in safety-critical applications where a system failure could cause severe damage and threaten human lives. To guarantee their flawless operation, their dependability attributes must be embedded early and continuously throughout system design, rather than treating them as an afterthought. This paper presents a conceptual framework for integrating the approach of adjustable reliability into the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The approach of adjustable reliability provides a way to distribute structural hardware redundancy and achieve the system reliability required by the application. The proposed framework shifts reliability from a design add-on to a core architectural decision variable in the design of dependable distributed systems. Opportunities and challenges involved are discussed, and some future research directions are outlined.