An optimal software maintenance policy based on reliability and risk

Software maintenance is assuming ever more a crucial role in the lifecycle of software due to the increase of software requirements and the high variability of software environment. Common approaches of studying software maintenance are to consider them as a static by-product of software operation and only the maintenance cost is covered. In this paper, software maintenance policies are studied with the consideration of software reliability and risk. An optimization model is defined to drive the choice of a maintenance schedule. The solution of the model provides the best maintenance policy and the choice of actual actions that will minimize the average maintenance cost while the software reliability and risk are acceptable. Finally, a numerical example is given to show the analysis process of our proposed policy.