Investigating the impact of effort slippages in software development project

In today's highly competitive market, it is very crucial for the software development team to provide on-time delivery of its product. To achieve this, development teams spend considerable time in planning the schedule for software product incorporating stated requirements but practically they are persistently plagued by schedule slippage. The objective of this study is to inspect the progress of the software project and to examine its schedule status on regular basis. The present paper integrates the concept of slippage and management evaluation into an effort-based Software Reliability Growth Model incorporating the application characteristics such as complexity of code, testing environment etc. The study also investigates the optimal release policies for the software. Our research assumes that the review process is scheduled by the management team during testing. This crucial evaluation assist in providing critical information regarding the additional effort required to meet the reliability objective within scheduled time or by keeping the effort expenditure fixed, reschedule the delivery of the project. For theoretical validation of results, numerical illustration is presented on a real-life software fault dataset under perfect debugging and imperfect debugging environment. The results obtained are beneficial in decision making for both the development team and the managers. Our study has relevance in wide range of industries handling diverse projects.