Two-Dimensional Release Policy for Software Systems Incorporating FRF, Opportunity Cost and Environment Factor

Abstract

AbstractSoftware development team intent to provide the best quality products under time and resource constraints. They single out their product in the market using various tools like advertisements, discounts, free trials, social networking etc. Warranty is one such tool used for product promotion. It assures customers from failure risks after product release. On one hand this helps to build the customer trust and brand image while on the other side it involves cost to developers in terms of cost incurred due to fault corrections during warranty period. Hence management has to maintain a balance so that they don’t have to bear undue financial losses. Therefore they plan release policies to determine the release time and the warranty time period that minimizes the cost. In this paper we have proposed a cost optimization model considering FRF based Two-Dimensional Delayed S-Shaped SRGM to define the failure behaviour under imperfect debugging, market opportunity cost, environmental factor and warranty policy. The model differentiates between the number of failures experienced and faults removed along with the probability of error generation. Once software is released it is affected by various external factors that may affect its failure behaviour. To accommodate the effect of external factor we have introduced an environment factor in the cost model. We have validated the model using the Tandem computers failure dataset. The optimization problem has been solved in MATLAB to determine optimal warranty and release time periods so that the total expected cost for software development is minimized.KeywordsSRGMFRFEnvironment factorOpportunity costRelease planningWarranty policy