MODELING TWO-DIMENSIONAL SOFTWARE MULTI-UPGRADATION AND RELATED RELEASE PROBLEM (A MULTI-ATTRIBUTE UTILITY APPROACH)

Abstract

The today's fast-paced, competitive environment in the field of Science and Technology, demands highly reliable hardware and software in order to achieve new breakthroughs in quality and productivity. In this scenario, first release of software products includes enough features and functionality to make it useful for the customers. Later, software companies have to come up with upgradation or add-ons in their software to survive in the market through a series of releases. Each succeeding upgradation offers some innovative performance or new functionality, distinguishing itself from the past releases. In one-dimensional Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGM) researcher used one factor such as Testing-Time, Testing-Effort or Coverage, etc. but within a two-dimensional SRGM environment, the process depends on two-types of reliability growth factors like Testing-time and Testing-effort. In addition, we also consider the combined effect of bugs encountered during testing of present release and user reported bugs from the operational phase. The model developed in the paper takes into consideration the testing and the operational phase where fault removal phenomenon follows, logistic and Weibull model, respectively. The paper also comprises of formulating an optimal release problem based on Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). Lastly, the model validation is done on real dataset of software already released in the market with successive generations.