Determining Optimal Release and Testing Stop Time of a Software Using Discrete Approach

In the last 20 years, researchers proposed to determine the optimal release and testing termination time considering the calendar time or continuous approach. However, it has been shown in the literature that it is better to develop the model by considering the number of test cases executed to remove faults. This is possible by using the discrete modelling approach developed in the software reliability literature. In the existing discrete software reliability literature, no work has been done in the direction of separating the release and testing termination time. In this work, the authors have developed a discrete framework to determine the optimal release and testing termination time under budgetary constraints. The numerical illustration suggests that it is better to release the software after executing a smaller number of testing periods. Also, the total cost in the proposed strategy is significantly less compared to the existing discrete release time literature.