A control flow representation for component-based software reliability analysis

Current reliability analysis techniques encounter a prohibitive challenge with respect to the control flow representation of large software systems with intricate control flow structures. Some techniques use a component-based Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure which represents only inter-component control flow transitions. This CFG structure disregards the dependencies among multiple outward control flow transitions of a system component and does not provide any details about a component internal control flow structure. To overcome these problems, some techniques use statement-based or block-based CFGs. However, these CFG structures are remarkably complex and difficult to use for large software systems. In this paper, we propose a simple CFG structure called Connection Dependency Graph (CDG) that represents inter-component and intra-component control flow transitions and preserves the dependencies among them. We describe the CDG structure and explain how to derive it from a program source code. Our derivation exploits a number of architectural patterns to capture the control flow transitions and identify the execution paths among connections. We provide a case study to examine the effect of program size on the CDG, the statement-based, and the block-based CFGs by comparing them with respect to complexity using the PostgreSQL open source database system.