Task assignment to distributed teams aided by a hybrid methodology of verbal decision analysis

Abstract

An increasingly common practice in large software development companies is to distribute tasks among geographically dispersed teams. This practice can bring many benefits, such as gains in terms of time and cost, but many are the challenges. One of the major challenges regards the method of assigning tasks to remote teams. This method involves knowing, classifying and ordering the factors that drive the assignment of tasks in a distributed scenario. This is a typical scenario for decision-making based on multiple criteria. Verbal decision analysis (VDA) is a multi-criteria framework to decision-making. This study presents a hybrid methodology structured on methods of VDA for classification ORdinal CLASSification (ORCLASS) and ordering (ZAPROS III-i) of factors that drive task assignment to distributed teams in software development projects. Tasks were grouped according to their type, i.e. requirements, architecture, implementation, and testing.