A Multi Release Cost Model in Distributed Environment

Abstract

Software industry has reached far beyond since its origin. Technical advancements are taking place at a speed faster than ever. This has further enhanced the pressure on software developers. They are trying hard to keep a pace with these rapid developments by coming out with strategies to increase the pace of their work without significantly affecting the software quality and reliability. One such strategy is distributed development of software in which the software is composed of two different types of components viz. newly developed and re-used component. Software developed in Distributed Development Environment (DDE) is characterized by enhanced availability and reliability. At the same time, the ever growing contention in the market and increasing needs of customers obligate the developers to come out with enhanced functionalities in the software from time to time leading to multiple releases of a software. The added functionalities further enhance the existing complexity of the software and testing team may not be able to perfectly remove the faults leading to imperfect debugging or add more bugs due to lack of knowledge about the software in the initial phase known as error generation. In this paper, we incorporated this real-life phenomenon to come out with a multi up-gradations modeling for removal of software fault in a distributed environment. In the present framework we described a cost model to obtain optimal release time in multi up-gradation of software under distributed environment. To validate the analytical results of the proposed framework, numerical illustration is provided.