Optimal Software Release Time with Patching Considered

Optimal software release policy is a well studied topic in the software reliability literature. However, all existing studies implicitly assume that testing stops at the time of release. Due to the advances in data communication technologies, an increasing number of software producers are providing patches for software defect correction and updates subsequent to a version release. Based on this fact, we propose an alternative release time scheduling policy – a software product is released before the optimal release time calculated by the traditional models and testing continues even after the software is released. Numerical solutions show that the optimal release policy with patching considered reduces the total cost by a significant amount.