Title: Impact of time-dependent environmental factor on software release planning

Authors: Vibha Verma; Sameer Anand; Hoang Pham; Anu Gupta Aggarwal

Addresses: Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India ' Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, University of Delhi, Delhi-110089, India ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers University, USA ' Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India

Abstract: Reliability assessment of software during operational phase is critical for release and warranty decisions because users are concerned about software performance during usage period. To characterise the distinctions in the settings during the testing and operational phase an environmental factor is introduced in release planning problem. It represents the impact of the usage frequency on software performance and the relative severity of the phases. In this paper, the effect of a constant environmental factor (during the warranty phase) and a time-dependent environmental factor (during the post-warranty phase) on reliability and release decisions have been analysed. A software cost model has been formulated that minimises the development cost and determines optimal variable values (testing and warranty time) while achieving reliability requirements incorporating environmental factor in the release model. The impact of changes in reliability requirements cost components, and environmental factor on the release schedule has been studied using real-life fault datasets.

Keywords: software release decisions; time-dependent environmental factor; warranty phase; testing phase; operational phase; development cost.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2025.147784

International Journal of Operational Research, 2025 Vol.53 No.4, pp.417 - 449

Received: 25 Jun 2022
Accepted: 19 Mar 2023
Published online: 01 Aug 2025 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article