Evaluation of software development life cycle using multi-criteria decision-making approach

In today's evolving and fast-paced software development space, choosing the right and best software development life cycle (SDLC) approach is a challenge for software development teams and for decision makers. Choosing the incorrect approach will lead to an endless number of issues and impact many software qualities. To provide a solution for that, this research employs multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods to handle the challenge of SDLC selection. Additionally, the innovative logarithmic percentage change-driven objective weighting (LOPCOW) method is used to evaluate the importance of the selected criteria, including requirement analysis (RA), development team expertise (DTE), user participation (UP), and project risk (PR). Moreover, the study has also developed a full decision matrix that assesses various SDLC methodologies. Thus, the SDLC methodologies were ranked using the weighted sum method (WSM). Our findings show that agile methodologies, in particular rapid application development (RAD) and extreme programming (XP), illustrated flexibility and efficiency in dynamic environments of a project. This research employed sensitivity analysis to validate the consistency of the results/outcomes across diverse scenarios, having in mind the importance of considering project requirements and organizational context when selecting the SDLC methodology.