Testing effort based modeling to determine optimal release and patching time of software

Abstract

In this era of information technology, our dependence on software systems is increasing day by day. This dependence on software systems has increased the pressure on software firms to fulfill the customer’s demand for highly reliable software. On the other hand, for ensuring high reliability of the software prolonged testing is required, which consumes large amount of resources hence not feasible in the current stiff market competition. Further delay in release can cost a lot in terms of market opportunity. Therefore, to sustain in the market, firms are releasing the software early and removing the remaining number of bugs by updating with patches. A patch is a piece of software designed to update a computer program or its supporting data, to fix or improve it. With such patches usually called bug fixes, firms improve the usability or performance of the software. Providing patches needs extra amount of effort and manpower which costs high. Also early patch release may result in improper removal of bugs and late release can increase the risk of more of failures in the operational phase To overcome the above issues we have proposed a testing effort based cost model to determine the optimal release and patch time of a software so that the total cost is minimized. In the proposed cost model developing team continues removing the faults even after software release. Further, we have taken different distribution function in pre and post release phase (before and after patching) to develop the proposed cost model. Numerical illustration is provided at the end of the paper for validation of the proposed cost model.