A General Purpose Software Evaluation System

Abstract

In the present day market situation, there are several alternatives available when a customer wants to purchase a product or adopt a software system that meets the customer’s requirements. General Purpose Software Evaluation (GPSE) system adopts state of the art statistical methods based on Multidimensional Weighted Attribute Framework (MWAF) for the evaluation of the available alternatives. By using GPSE system, the user can follow the MWAF process and design the architecture which best describes the given evaluation problem. The architectural elements of MWAF essentially focus on survey questionnaire which involves gathering information from multiple domain experts. The GPSE system then applies principles of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Tukey’s pairwise comparison tests on the data collected to arrive at selection of the best suited alternative for the given problem. The GPSE system has been fully implemented and successfully tested on several projects including evaluation of multi-agent development methodologies and selection of COTS products.