Risk Prioritizing with Weighted Failure Mode and Effects Analysis and Fuzzy Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis: An Application Software Service Provider Company in the Defense Industry

Abstract

With the development of technology, the need for software and software products to manage, control, and develop activities in many sectors is increasing daily. In order to create suitable software that will meet the needs of businesses and customers, the software application must be tested in detail before reaching the end user. For this reason, software testing processes are gaining importance in software development activities. This article discusses which errors are critical to solve in complex situations for the reliability and quality of the software product and the relationship between errors. In this study, the classical FMEA method was primarily used to identify and prioritize errors in an ongoing project of a company that provides software services in the defense industry. Later, to eliminate the shortcomings of the classical FMEA method, a new model, the weighted FMEA method (which calculates the risk priority score with five sub-severity components), was developed and applied. In the newly developed weighted FMEA method, the weights were determined by the fuzzy SWARA (Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) method since the weights of the severity subcomponents were not the same. The risk priority number (RPN) of error types was calculated using classical FMEA and weighted FMEA. Since the RPNs calculated with weighted FMEA are calculated with more subcomponents, the chances of the RPNs’ errors appearing the same are much less than the RPNs calculated with classical FMEA. This situation indicates that the RPNs calculated with weighted FMEA are obtained from a more profound analysis.