Construction of Reliable Software in Resource Constrained Environments

Current software development practices are often “business-driven” and therefore tend to encourage testing approaches that reduce verification and validation activities to shorten schedules. In this paper, we focus on efficiency of testing and resulting software quality (reliability) in such an environment. We use a resource constrained testing model to analyze data from several projects. Our results indicate that in a practical resource constrained environment there is little room for improving testing during the actual process. Furthermore, there is likely to be considerable variability in the quality of testing, within a testing phase, that may stem from a variety of sources such as the human element, software development practices and the structure of the software itself. However, it is interesting to note that there are experimental results showing that testing efficiency can be improved over longer periods of time through process improvement, and that software quality does appear to be positively correlated with an increase in the average testing efficiency that stems from process improvements.