Choquet integral based aggregation approach to software development risk assessment

Software is a crucial component of today's business environment, and a superior risk management effort is required to adeptly steer software development projects. Software development risks are inherently dependent, in other words, mutually positive or negative assessments of some risks can influence the decision to accept or reject a project. This fact cannot be modeled with a traditional best compromise seeking method. Aggregation operations based on the family of fuzzy integrals include many operators and thus can express a variety of decision maker behaviors. This study proposes an integrated multi-criteria evaluation methodology for software development experts and managers to better enable them to position their projects in terms of the associated risks. The method relies on a special fuzzy operator, namely a two-additive Choquet integral that enables modeling various effects of importance and interactions among risks. The potential of the proposed methodology is exposed through a case study conducted in a Turkish software company. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.