Fault severity based multi-release SRGM with testing resources

In today’s environment of global competition where each company is trying to prove itself better than its competitors the software developers have to come up with multiple releases in order to survive in the market. Each release offers some innovative performance enhancement or some new functionality that distinguishing itself from the past release. But enhancing the product and upcoming with successive releases puts a constant pressure on even the best organized engineering organizations. The reason being, up-grading a software application is a complex process. Upgrading a software introduces the risk that the new release will contain a bug, causing the program to fail. Therefore, to capture the effect of faults generated in the software with multiple releases, we have developed a multi release software reliability model in this paper. The model uniquely takes into account the faults of the current release and the remaining faults of just previous release. The multi release software reliability growth model treats the fault removal rate as a function of testing resources consumed. In addition, the model also incorporates the severity of faults and considers that hard faults are removed with different rate than the rate required to remove simple faults. The model developed is validated on real data set with software which has been released in the market with new features four times.