Determining the optimal allocation of testing resource for modular software system using dynamic programming

Abstract

Reliability is a major concern in the process of software development because unreliable software can cause failure in the computer system that can be hazardous. A way to enhance the reliability of software is to detect and remove the faults during the testing phase, which begins with module testing wherein modules are tested independently to remove a substantial number of faults within a limited resource. Therefore, the available resource must be allocated among the modules in such a way that the number of faults is removed as much as possible from each of the modules to achieve higher software reliability. In this article, we discuss the problem of optimal resource allocation of the testing resource for a modular software system, which maximizes the number of faults removed subject to the conditions that the amount of testing-effort is fixed, a certain percentage of faults is to be removed and a desired level of reliability is to be achieved. The problem is formulated as a non linear programming problem (NLPP), which is modeled by the inflection S-shaped software reliability growth models (SRGM) based on a non homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) which incorporates the exponentiated Weibull (EW) testing-effort functions. A solution procedure is then developed using a dynamic programming technique to solve the NLPP. Furthermore, three special cases of optimum resource allocations are also discussed. Finally, numerical examples using three sets of software failure data are presented to illustrate the procedure developed and to validate the performance of the strategies proposed in this article. Experimental results indicate that the proposed strategies may be helpful to software project managers for making the best decisions in allocating the testing resource. In addition, the results are compared with those of Kapur et al. (2004), Huang and Lyu (2005), and Jha et al. (2010) that are available in the literature to deal the similar problems addressed in this article. It reveals that the proposed dynamic programming method for the testing-resource allocation problem yields a gain in efficiency over other methods.