AN ASSESSMENT OF TESTING COST WITH EFFORT-DEPENDENT FDP AND FCP UNDER LEARNING EFFECT: A GENETIC ALGORITHM APPROACH

Abstract

Software testing involves verification and validation of the software to meet the requirements elucidated by customers in the earlier phases and to subsequently increase software reliability. Around half of the resources, such as manpower and CPU time are consumed and a major portion of the total cost of developing the software is incurred in testing phase, making it the most crucial and time-consuming phase of a software development lifecycle (SDLC). Also the fault detection process (FDP) and fault correction process (FCP) are the important processes in SDLC. A number of software reliability growth models (SRGM) have been proposed in the last four decades to capture the time lag between detected and corrected faults. But most of the models are discussed under static environment. The purpose of this paper is to allocate the resources in an optimal manner to minimize the cost during testing phase using FDP and FCP under dynamic environment. An elaborate optimization policy based on optimal control theory for resource allocation with the objective to minimize the cost is proposed. Further, genetic algorithm is applied to obtain the optimum value of detection and correction efforts which minimizes the cost. Numerical example is given in support of the above theoretical result. The experimental results help the project manager to identify the contribution of model parameters and their weight.