AN INTEGRATED AHP-TOPSIS METHODOLOGY TO EVALUATE FOR ADOPTION COTS DATABASE COMPONENTS BASED ON USABILITY

摘要

The judicious use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in development projects of large systems has effectively accommodated the changing business landscape in addition to providing better software reuse functionalities. Greater productivity, flexibility, ownership and reusability, accelerated development, increased dependability, and reduced process risk being some of the many. A bigger risk is involved in choosing a right component among many available alternatives, which is also considered a hard process. The involvement and contribution of different stakeholders with vested interests further complicates this process. End users would prefer being abstracted from such a process and are primarily concerned with an easy product usage, effectively making Usability a much focused attribute. This drives the need for a mechanism to help stakeholders make such abstracted decisions. Multiple conflicting criteria during decision making can be explicitly evaluated through MCDA and MCDM - Sub-Disciplines of Operations research. Here we introduce one such decision-making methodology. Well-known MCDM techniques, namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) have been employed to generate a hybrid approach from AHP and TOPSIS. This approach facilitates the ability to analyze and select the best alternative from a number of COTS components, a crucial feature in decision making. We begin with obtaining the weights of selected criteria and then the structure of the database software selection problem will be analyzed. Finally, the alternatives ratings COTS or Database Software component will be calculated by using TOPSIS Technique.