A fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) based software quality assessment model: Maintainability analysis

Abstract

Software quality assessment at the architectural level is efficient because it provides various advantages to find and fix design errors at the earliest stage of software development life cycle (SDLC).Numerous methods have been evolved to validate quality-related issues at the architectural level. The software quality comprises of a total of eight attributes where maintainability is one of the important attribute which affects the overall system quality. Though few methods are available for maintainability analysis, none of the state of art method employs fuzzy logic with Quality Model for Object Oriented Design (QMOOD) metric suite. In this paper, the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method is proposed with Buckley method to evaluate the influence of maintainability and its subattributes in software quality at the architectural level. The proposed evaluation model is tested against several versions of the MFC and OWL windows application frameworks and the obtained results are compared with the state-of-the-art methods. This experimental analysis shows that the FAHP with Buckley method is superior to the other compared methods.