Evaluating Software Quality Attributes using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Abstract

The use of quality software is of importance to stakeholders and its demand is on the increase. This work focuses on meeting software quality from the user and developer’s perspective. After a review of some existing software-quality models, twenty-four software quality attributes addressed by ten models such as the McCall’s, Boehm’s, ISO/IEC, FURPS, Dromey’s, Kitchenham’s, Ghezzi’s, Georgiadou’s, Jamwal’s and Glibb’s models were identified. We further categorized the twenty-four attributes into a group of eleven (11) main attributes and another group of thirteen (13) sub-attributes. Thereafter, questionnaires were administered to twenty experts from fields including Cybersecurity, Programming, Software Development and Software Engineering. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to perform a multi-criteria decision-making assessment on the responses from the questionnaires to select the suitable software quality attribute for the development of the proposed quality model to meet both users and developer’s software quality requirements. The results obtained from the assessment showed Maintainability to be the most important quality attribute followed by Security, Testability, Reliability, Efficiency, Usability, Portability, Reusability, Functionality, Availability and finally, Cost.