Class Activity: Dependability for you Team Project

Instructions:

Step 1: Understanding Dependability (5 Minutes)

  1. As a team, review the key dependability concepts from the text or slides:
    • Reliability: How consistently does your software function as expected?
    • Availability: How often is your software accessible when needed?
    • Safety: Could failures in your software cause harm or significant issues?
    • Security: How well is your software protected from threats?
    • Redundancy & Diversity: Can backups or alternative implementations reduce failures?
  2. Discuss briefly with your team:
    • Why is dependability important in software?
    • Can you think of real-world software failures caused by poor dependability?

Step 2: Analyzing Dependability in Your Project (15 Minutes)

  1. Identify Dependability Needs (5 min):
    • Who are the users of your project? What dependability expectations do they have?
    • Which of the four dependability aspects (reliability, availability, safety, security) are most critical for your project?
  2. Assess Potential Failures & Consequences (5 min):
    • List possible failure scenarios in your software (e.g., crashes, data loss, security breaches).
    • For each failure, determine:
      • Likelihood: High / Medium / Low
      • Severity: High / Medium / Low
    • What could be the real-world consequences of these failures?
  3. Brainstorm Strategies for Improving Reliability (5 min):
    • What can you do in development or testing to reduce failures?
    • Would automated testing, error handling, or performance monitoring help?
    • What steps could improve system uptime and prevent critical failures?

Step 3: Exploring Redundancy & Diversity (10 Minutes)

  1. Understand the concepts:
    • Redundancy: Adding backups or failover systems to handle failures.
    • Diversity: Using alternative approaches to reduce the risk of a single point of failure.
  2. Discuss with your team:
    • Is there a way to add redundancy to your project? (e.g., data backups, server failovers, redundant processes)
    • Could diversity improve your system? (e.g., using multiple security layers, different programming languages for critical components)
  3. Decide on one strategy to enhance dependability in your project.

Step 4: Use AI to Evaluate and Expand Your Redundancy Ideas

Use an AI assistant (such as ChatGPT or another LLM) to critically evaluate the redundancy ideas your team developed in Step 3. Do the following:

  • Share a brief description of your system and the redundancy mechanisms you’ve discussed so far.
  • Ask the AI to:
    • Assess the strengths and weaknesses of your redundancy approaches.
    • Suggest additional or alternative redundancy strategies, including both software and hardware options.
    • Highlight any overlooked risks or failure points where redundancy might be valuable.

As a team, discuss the AI-generated suggestions. Then update your redundancy plan by:

  • Keeping good ideas from your original plan,
  • Incorporating useful new suggestions from the AI, and
  • Noting any ideas you deliberately decided not to use, with a brief explanation why.

Be prepared to briefly share how the AI helped your team refine or improve your dependability planning.

Step 5: Team Presentations & Discussion (25 Minutes)

  1. Each team will briefly present (5 minutes):
    • The most critical dependability risk in their project.
    • A worst-case failure scenario and its impact.
    • One specific improvement to enhance reliability.
    • A way redundancy or diversity could be used.
  2. After each presentation, listen to other teams and discuss:
    • What common dependability challenges do different projects face?
    • What are some creative ways teams are improving reliability?

Wrap-Up & Reflection

  • Dependability is essential in real-world software.
  • Analyzing failures and risks helps you build more robust software.
  • Redundancy and diversity are valuable but require trade-offs.
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