Testing Resource Allocation for Software System: An Approach Integrating MEMV-OWA and DEMATEL

In the process of resource allocation for software development, specific amount of resources need to be assigned to different modules of a software application from the available resources. To achieve this, it is essential to consider the various quality characteristics of a software. The key criteria for gauging the quality attributes of a software has been taken from the previous studies, practice and theory. The present study, one of the multi-criteria decision making technique, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is applied to determine the cause and effect relationship between quality characteristics. This helps in selecting the important characteristics and discarding the ones that are not so significant. The outcomes of this study can be used to divide criteria into two groups namely cause and effect groups and hence construct an Impact Relationship Map. Later, the maximal entropy minimum variance ordered weighted averaging (MEMV-OWA) method has been used to determine the module weights for resource allocation and ranking of various modules based on conflicting nature of characteristics in order to allocate the resources in a competent way. The detailed methodology has been illustrated through a numerical example.