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Top1. Introduction
Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software (Bourque & Dupuis 2004) Software development and evolution is characterized by multiple objectives and constraints (Ruhe, 2002) Thus, in order to develop software that caters to the needs of the client, it becomes inevitable to assess its quality. The quality of a software can be assessed based on various parameters by using standard software quality models (Al-Badareen et.al, 2011). However, difficulty arises when the client wishes to consider multiple aspects at once and not just one criterion for deciding the most apt model for their application. It is difficult to decide the most suitable software quality model based on all of the client’s requirements. The work presented here is focused on choosing the best software quality model according to the client’s needs where the client can give more importance to specific criteria compared to others as per his/her application requirements. Then it will help them decide the best alternative suitable for their application. Since, this task is complex and depended upon multiple factors, so we applied multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches.
Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques provide solutions to the problems involving conflicting and multiple objectives (Velasquez & Hester, 2013). It has all the characteristics of a useful decision support tool. MCDM problems are comprised of five components: Goal, Decision maker or group of decision makers with opinions (preferences), Decision alternatives, Evaluation criteria (interests), Outcomes or consequences associated with alternative/interest combination. For our proposed work, the goal is to find the most suitable software quality model. This decision can be made by the software developers on the basis of the preferences provided by the clients. Various software attributes such as reliability, correctness, reusability etc. will act as the evaluation criteria. The set of alternatives that will be evaluated in our work are: McCall (McCall et.al, 1977), ISO-9126 (Behkamal et.al, 2009), FURPS (Al-Qutaish, 2010), Boehm (Boehm et.al, 1978) and Dromey (Dromey, 1995), The work proposed in this article is based on the application of three Multi Criteria Decision making algorithms namely Analytic Hierarchy Process, TOPSIS and PROMETHEE II along with the application of Fuzzy Logic [10,11].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the next section highlights few related works in the literature. Section 3 explains our proposed work. In Section 4, the experimental analysis is included. Section 5 concludes the article with future directions.