Using Attributed Goal Graphs for Software Component Selection: An Application of Goal-Oriented Analysis to Decision Making

During software requirements analysis and design steps, developers and stakeholders have many alternatives of artifacts such as software component selection and should make decisions to select best alternatives out of them. There are two significant points to be considered for supporting these decision making processes; 1) dependencies among alternatives and 2) evaluation based on multicriteria and their trade-off. This paper proposes the technique to address the above two issues by using an extended version of goal-oriented analysis. In goal-oriented analysis, elicited goals and their dependencies are represented with an AND-OR acyclic directed graph. We use this technique to model the dependencies of the alternatives. Furthermore we associate attribute values and their propagation rules with nodes and edges in a goal graph in order to model multi-criteria and to evaluate the alternatives with them.