Determining Optimal Release and Testing Stop Time of a Software Using Discrete Approach

Abstract

In the last 20 years researcher’s proposed to determine the optimal release and testing termination time considering the calendar time or continuous approach. However, it has been shown in the literature that it is better to develop the model by considering the number of test cases executed to remove faults. This is possible by using the discrete modelling approach developed in the software reliability literature. In the existing discrete software reliability literature, no work has been done in the direction of separating the release and testing termination time. In this work, we have developed a discrete framework to determine the optimal release and testing termination time under budgetary constraints. The numerical illustration suggests that it is better to release the software after executing a lesser number of testing periods. Also, the total cost in the proposed strategy is significantly less as compared to the existing discrete release time literature.