Testing of software with an operational profile

One of the important features of any software system is its operational pro file. This is simply the set of all operations that a software is designed to perform and the occurence probabilities of these operations. We present a new model on optimal software testing such that testing is done sequentia lly using a set of test cases. There may be failures due to the operations in each of these cases. The model parameters, consisting of testing costs a nd failure rates, all depend on the cases used and the operations performed . Our aim is to find the optimal testing durations in all of the cases in o rder to minimize the total expected cost. This problem leads to interesting decision models involving nonlinear programming formulations that possess explicit analytical solutions under reasonable assumptions. (C) 2000 John W iley & Sons, Inc.