The need for reliable software

We know that the subject of software reliability is a crucial one for the continued success of software engineering in the ensuing digital era. However, it is not easy thing to do. Because of the rising complexity of software suites, ensuring high reliability turns out to be a tough and time-consuming affair. Experts, evangelists, and exponents have come out with a few interesting and inspiring ideas for accomplishing reliable software systems. Primarily, there are two principal approaches; these are as follows:

• Resilient microservices can lead to the realization of reliable software applications. Popular technologies include microservices, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, API Gateway and Management Suite, Istio, and Spinnaker.
• Reactive systems (resilient, responsive, message-driven, and elastic)—this is based on the famous Reactive Manifesto. There are a few specific languages and platforms (http://vertx.io/, http://reactivex.io/, https://www.lightbend.com/products/reactive-platform, RxJava, play framework, and so on) for producing reactive systems. vAkka is a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications for Java and Scala.

Here are the other aspects being considered for producing reliable software packages:

• Verification and validation of software reliability through various testing methods
• Software reliability prediction algorithms and approaches
• Static and dynamic code analysis methods
• Patterns, processes, platforms, and practices for building reliable software packages

Let's discuss these in detail.