Testing Time and Effort-Based Successive Release Modeling of a Software in the Presence of Imperfect Debugging

The role of software is expanding rapidly in every aspect of modern life. As the life of software is short, the software developers adopt the strategy of releasing software in successive releases to survive in the competitive market. Thus, software upgradation and technology advancement have become the source of real value to the customer. But, upgrading software is a tedious process, thereby making the software complex. This complexity introduces a risk of increase in the faults in the software. At times, the testing team may not be able to remove the fault perfectly on observation of a failure, and the original fault may remain resulting in the phenomenon of imperfect debugging. This situation arises due to improper understanding and complex nature of the software. In this paper, we have incorporated the effect of imperfect debugging to develop a testing time and effort-based software reliability growth model for successive releases of a software. We have incorporated a well-known Cobb-Douglas production function to describe the behavior of testing time and effort consumed for the successive release problem of the software. The faults detected in the operational phase or left undetected during the testing of previous release are also incorporated in the next release. The proposed models have been validated on real data set of four releases. The estimated parameters and comparison criteria are also given.