Software reliability allocation incorporating Pythagorean fuzzy theory and AHP

Abstract

Systematic management in the early stage of development helps the software firms to develop a qualitative software product. One of the crucial tasks in the software design phase of software development life cycle is to assign reliabilities to modules based on the overall reliability goal. AHP has been extensively used to allocate reliability among modules on the basis of preferences given by the decision-maker, who can be an industry expert or senior level IT personnel. Their opinions are obtained in linguistic terms and later converted to crisp values for comparison at various levels. This approach incorporates vague decisions, incomplete information and uncertain preferences during decision-making. In this paper, we discuss an allocation method where preferences are assigned in terms of Pythagorean fuzzy numbers based on a hierarchy that relates the users, software engineers and programmer expectations for the software system. The methodology and concepts used have been discussed in detail. The proposed approach has been implemented through an example problem.