Cost-Reliability Optimal Software Release Policy under Penalty Cost Based on the HGDM

Abstract

One of the important applications of software reliability growth models is to determine when to stop testing and release the software to the users. The Hyper-Grometric Distribution software relability growth Model (HGDM) has been developed to estimate the number of faults initially resident in a program at the beginning of the test/debug phase. In this paper based on HGDM, we investigate the cost-reliability optimalsoftware release policy which not only minimizes the total software cost but also satisfies the software reliability requirement. The total software cost here includes the penalty cost which should be paid by the manufacturer if the software is delivered after the scheduled delivery time. The main result is that the optimal release time can be detemined and shown to be finite. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the cost-reliability optimal software release policy.