Software Project Management Tools: Making a Practical Decision Using AHP

Abstract

The selection of an appropriate software project management tool, as in the selection of many other tools, is often approached using an ad hoc process. Such non-rigorous approaches often based on personal preference, intuition, or marketing hype, can lead to an erroneous result. In this paper a rigorous model for selecting a software project management tool using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is presented. The AHP provides a flexible, systematic, and repeatable evaluation procedure that can easily be understood by the decision maker in selecting the appropriate software project management tool. Several relevant factors based on the most common features offered by commercial off-the-shelf solutions (COTS) are used as the selection criteria in ranking the software project management tools. The contribution of this work is to apply a well-known decision making procedure in a novel way to help decision makers better identify an appropriate software project management tool without having to go through a more extensive evaluation process. In addition, this work establishes a framework for comparing individual product decisions across projects, project managers, organizational groups, and organizations