Towards economical software release recommendations

An economic view on software quality is essential for company success. An economic view is also needed for the assessment whether software is ready for release. To give an economical software release recommendation, we must trade off the consequential costs against the removal costs. Simply causing release recommendations on failure-based metrics is not sufficient. We must also regard the test quality if the software release depends on failure statistics. In this work, we survey existing release recommendation approaches. We conclude that existing approaches do not sufficiently regard costs or test quality. Thus, none of the approaches can give an economical release recommendation. We present a release recommendation framework. It focuses on trading off the failure consequential costs against the failure removal costs for each failure at the end of the test process. The test quality is explicitly regarded as a fundamental aspect to ensure a valid release recommendation. We show the applicability of our framework in a hypothetical case study comparing traditional approaches with our framework.