When to Stop Testing Software? Some Exact Results

Developers of large software systems must decide how much to test a piece of software before it is released. We consider an explicit tradeoff between the costs of testing and releasing. The cost of testing may include the cost of a lost economic initiative because of continued testing and the cost of releasing may include the cost of customer dissatisfaction and cost of fixing an unknown number of bugs in the released version. The problem is formulated as a sequential Bayes problem in which information from past experience is also used. The structure of the optimal policy is determined.