A unified approach for optimal release, patching and testing time of a software

The ever growing consumer's expectations for innovative and reliable software products within no time have driven developers to reframe the whole development process accordingly. To sustain in the stiff market competition, nowadays software firms are releasing their product early and continue testing to fix the remaining number of bugs in the operational phase by providing patches. A patch is a small program to fix the bugs. But continuing testing to provide patches for better product experience to users is also not economical from the firm's point of view. In the existing software reliability literature, few researchers have worked on to determine the optimal release and testing stop time of a software, but no work has been done to determine the optimal time for releasing, patching and to stop testing the software. In this paper, we present a unified framework of optimal policy to determine optimal software release time, patching time and testing stop time, to minimise overall testing cost. The proposed cost model is validated on a real life software failure dataset of tandem computers.