Release time problem with multiple constraints

Abstract

Quality of software system generally depends on how much time testing takes and what testing methodologies are used. One attribute of quality is reliability which can be increased by removing more faults from the software and this can be done by spending more time on testing. However, spending more time on testing will increase cost of the software development process. On the other hand, if testing time is too short, testing cost of software may be reduced but it will increase the chance of getting unreliable software and customers may not take higher risk of buying unreliable software. Highly competitive market conditions have forced developers to offer highly reliable products to the users. Software warranty is one such indicator used by the users to judge its reliability with the perception that a longer warranty period indicates higher reliability. Software warranty is a tool which provides assurance about the quality. Warranty cost may be reduced by providing more reliable product. Therefore software reliability, testing, warranty period and cost needs to be considered jointly. In this paper, we propose a new method to estimate the optimal software release time of a software with warranty under imperfect debugging environment by using Multi Attribute Utility Theory. More precisely, three significant attributes, namely Reliability, Cost and Detection rate indicator are used to determine the optimal release time of software under warranty. The proposed new decision model based on multi-attribute utility analysis is tested on the real world data set.