Testing-effort allocation policies under software cost constraints based on an optimal release problem with delivery delay

In the software testing phase, many development resources are consumed to detect and remove software faults introduced in the development process. So it is very important for a manager to decide how to effectively spend testing efforts during development. In this paper, testing-effort allocation policies during a module testing phase based on an optimal release problem with delivery delay under total software cost constraints are discussed. Such cost factor considerations enable us to make release decisions as to when to transfer a software system from module testing to integration testing. The underlying reliability model describing a software fault detection phenomenon is a testing-effort-dependent software reliability growth model based on a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. We also provide numerical examples of the optimal policies.