A Study of When to Release a Software Product from the Perspective of Software Reliability Models

摘要

If a software product with a significant number of defects is released too early to users, the software manufacturer will incur post-release costs of fixing the faults. If a product is released too late, the additional development cost and the risk of missing a market window could be substantial. Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) can capture the quantitative aspects of testing and are used to estimate software release time. From a cost-benefit viewpoint, SRGMs aid developers to decide the optimal release time of the software product by providing effective approaches to minimising the expected total software system cost. This paper helps answer the question of when to stop testing a software product by presenting the perspectives from a study of cost models. The study focuses on aspects of the relationship between development cost and schedule delivery of the software product and the total software cost including the risk costs, such as the penalty cost incurred due to late delivery of software product and the cost of fixing a fault during the warranty period. We also investigate various software release policies, for example, policies based on the dual constraints of cost and reliability.