A software reliability assessment method under distributed development environment with application to optimal software release problems

Many software systems have been produced under host-concentrated development environment. At present, the software development environment has been changing into distributed one because of the progress of WS (workstation) and network computing technology. In this paper, we discuss a software reliability growth model (SRGM) which evaluates the software quality quantitatively in the system testing-phase of the distributed development environment. We perform the sensitivity analysis with changing the weight parameters for each software component. We also compare the goodness-of-fit of our model with existing two conventional SR,GM's. Besides, we find the optimal total testing time considering the total expected software maintenance cost in such distributed development environment. Such a problem is so-called an optimal software release problem. Several optimal software release problems considering host-concentrated software development process have been proposed by many researchers so far. On the other hand, few optimal software release problems for distributed development environment have been proposed. Therefore, in this paper, we formulate a maintenance cost model based on our software reliability growth model. Further, several numerical examples based on the derived optimal release policies are presented.