Title: A user-oriented reliability modelling approach for web systems

Authors: Wen-Li Wang, Thomas L. Hemminger, Mei-Huei Tang

Addresses: School of Engineering, Behrend College Erie, Penn State University, Erie, Pennsylvania 16563, USA. ' School of Engineering, Behrend College Erie, Penn State University, Erie, Pennsylvania 16563, USA. ' Computer and Information Science Department, Gannon University, Erie, Pennsylvania 16541, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we describe a user-oriented reliability model that addresses extensive web content, including many links, and that simultaneously addresses user dynamic navigation behaviour. Computation time is a problem in web systems because content can be tightly coupled. An alternative approach is to skip the consideration of the actual dynamic relationships but this is undesirable because the quality of a web system is bound to the success of a series of user navigations. These issues motivate our study from a user perspective. By parsing the logs, past navigations can be restored to form a flow graph. Our model adopts the idea of cyclomatic complexity to convert the graph to a maximum number of independent paths so that reliability can be computed by discounting the probabilities of unreliable paths. The application of this model can prioritise the fault removal sequence to assist in resource and effort allocation to improve reliability.

Keywords: referrers; independent paths; depth-first traversal; dynamic programming; user navigation behaviour; reliability modelling; web engineering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2007.012058

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2007 Vol.3 No.3, pp.288 - 306

Published online: 16 Jan 2007 *

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