Software release policies with gain in reliability justifying the costs

An important question in the developing process of software products is when to stop testing to make the gain in reliability justify the costs. In this paper, a software reliability-cost model is presented to determine the optimal release policies that maximize the expected net gain in reliability. Several software cost factors are considered in this study, such as the cost of removing detected errors and the risk cost due to software failure. The error removal cost is modeled based on a stochastic process. A software reliability model based on the non-homogeneous Poisson process is used. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the results. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.