Application of Software Reliability Measurement to Distributed Architectures

The complexity of distributed computer systems has been growing steadily over the past several years. Examples of such systems are the local area computer networks used in today's switching products. This increase in complexity is not just due to an increase in hardware complexity. Since, for example, in order to maintain the hardware and software in these distributed systems, various added software systems are needed including systems which supply multiple views of the complex, common interfaces, common database structures, network load balancing, automatic trouble analysis, etc. The viability of such architectures will depend on the extent to which quality software systems can be developed and implemented. Without them, the emerging distributed architectures will be much too complex to administer and maintain.