Evaluation of software development projects using a fuzzy multi-criteria decision approach

Software development is an inherently uncertain activity. To deal with the uncertainty and vagueness from humans’ subjective perception and experience in decision process, this paper presents an evaluation model based on the fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method for measuring the performance of software development projects. In an MCDM problem, a decision maker (DM) has to choose the best alternative that satisfies the evaluation criteria among a set of candidate solutions. It is generally hard to find an alternative that meets all the criteria simultaneously, so a good compromise solution is preferred. This problem may become more complex when multiple DMs are involved, each having not a common perception on the alternatives. Recently, a compromise ranking method (known as the VIKOR method) has been proposed to identify such compromise solutions, by providing a maximum group utility for the majority and a minimum of an individual regret for the opponent. In its actual setting, the method treats exact values for the assessment of the alternatives, which can be quite restrictive with unquantifiable criteria. This will be true especially if the evaluation is made by means of linguistic terms. For this reason we extend the VIKOR method so as to process such data and to provide a more comprehensive evaluation in a fuzzy environment. To demonstrate the potential of the methodology, the proposed extension is used for measuring the performance of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software products.