An entropy-based group decision-making approach for software quality evaluation

Abstract

Software quality evaluation (SQE) is a multi-dimensional decision-making problem. The increasingly complex socioeconomic environment has made group decision making (GDM) more important. Determination of the relative contribution (weight) of individual decision makers is an important part of the GDM process. Calculation of the similarity between decision matrices, potentially using a comprehensive projection measure, is also critical. This paper presents: (1) a new entropy-based approach to determine the weight of decision makers; (2) a novel normalized projection approach to measuring the similarity between two decision matrices; and (3) new group regret and satisfaction reference matrices that are modeled in a GDM setting. A comprehensive GDM method is proposed and adopted for SQE. An experimental analysis is conducted to investigate the practicability, feasibility, and validity of the proposed GDM method. The experimental results confirm the proposed GDM method as practicable, producing stable rankings of alternatives, with the same ranking of alternatives being produced in almost all of the dynamic experimental cases.