OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF TESTING RESOURCE FOR A MODULAR SOFTWARE

Abstract

Several Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) have been developed in the literature to account for exponential and S-shaped growth curves. There are others, which can account for both depending on the testing environment. Such models are termed as flexible models. Most of the models use calendar/execution time as the testing time. Very few SRGMs have been developed which define explicitly the testing effort functions into the modeling. Testing effort/resource may be computer time and manpower needed during testing. The aim of this paper is twofold. 1. Develop an SRGM with testing efforts which is also flexible 2. Use model in (1) to allocate optimally the testing resource to a modular software subject to different constraints. Model developed in (1) is validated on different data sets and predictive validity is established. Optimization problems in (2) are mathematical programming problems having the sum of fractional functions as the common objective. These are solved using a dynamic programming approach and closed form solutions have been obtained. Finally, numerical illustrations are provided for two optimization problems.