A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Framework for Software Project Management Tool Selection

Project management tools are critical for managing software projects, decreasing costs, accelerating timelines, and using available resources effectively. However, project managers find it very tedious to choose a suitable software project management (SPM) tool from available tools in the market. The appropriateness of the SPM tool depends on the nature of the software project being developed - an SPM tool suitable for a large-scale software project may not be appropriate for small-scale projects. However, due to the complexities of the software projects and the development conditions, the selection of an SPM tool is often biased by personal preferences or marketing publicities which may lead to inefficiencies in SPM and consequently, lead to higher cost and lower quality of end product. In this work, we present a decision support framework for SPM tool selection. The proposed system develops a set of selection criteria based on an analytic network process (ANP). To demonstrate the internal working of the proposed framework, we put forward an example of the tool selection problem using the proposed system. Furthermore, the proposed system can be used as is for SPM tool selection for other than software projects.