MULTI-CRITERIA SELECTION OF SOFTWARE COMPONENTS USING FUZZY-AHP APPROACH

Object-oriented programming is not enough influential to handle the changing requirements. Component-based software development is a paradigm, which develops software systems that are integrated with the existing software component as plug-ins, which can be reused again and again. Hence, reusability of a component is more important than other quality factors of a software system. Selection of the most reusable software component is one of the critical activity for developing a quality system. Reusability has few types of sub-quality factors, which have considerable impact on reusability either directly or indirectly. In this paper Fuzzy-Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy-A HP) model is proposed for component selection using reusability as an important quality factor of a software component. Proposed model selects components with concurrent consideration of multiple criteria and ranks the components according to their reusability values. An empirical analysis has also been carried out on six industrial components, which are used for cleaning the system or improving system performance. A code is developed in Java for the proposed model, which successfully assigns the rank to each component based on overall performance index value. The result shows that the proposed approach is suitable for identifying the best software component in efficient and simple manner.