Developers typically address dependability concerns in the late phases of system development. However, two trends are compelling developers to consider dependability earlier, at the architectural level. First, emerging applications are increasingly complex. Second, to address this first trend, developers are increasingly attempting to build dependable systems from existing undependable components. A new architectural approach employs exception handling to represent and analyze fault-tolerant software systems. It partitions architectural elements into normal and exceptional parts, thus promoting a clear separation of concerns regarding how to detect and handle errors.

This article is part of a focus section on software architecture.