Providing Priority Degrees for the Challenges of Cloud-Based Outsource Software Development Projects via Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process Methods

Abstract

Cloud-based outsource software development (COSD) is a fairly new and popular software development methodology, which is enabled by the enormous growth of the cloud computing services in the last decade. The key idea of the methodology is to support software development processes of companies having software development team members from all around the world work collaboratively via cloud services. While there are quite some benefits a company could draw, there are also some challenges associated with the execution of a COSD project. It is intuitively essential to have a reliable way to assess a COSD project for its success. In this study, using Magnitude Based Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (MFAHP) as a method to prioritize and weight the challenges of a COSD project is presented. MFAHP is a fuzzy extension of the classical AHP which is shown to produce comparable results to other Fuzzy AHP (FAHP) methods with much smaller number of computations. The performance of the suggested methodology is evaluated and compared to Chang’s Fuzzy Extent Analysis on AHP (FEA) and Geometric Mean (GM) Methods, which are two other established FAHP methods. The results show that MFAHP and GM perform quite similar, whereas FEA gives inconsistent outputs. Among 21 different subcategories of COSD project challenges determined, “compatibility issues” are anticipated to have the highest weight individually while “organization management” is the most important of 4 main categories.

Keywords

• criteria prioritization
• magnitude based fuzzy analytic hierarchy process
• challenges of cloud-based outsource software development projects

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