Requirements for a Tool in Support of SE Technology Selection

Decision support in software engineering is an emerging field. The need to select the best method, technique or tool in a given business context is becoming more and more important in an increasingly competitive world where time-to-market, budget constraints, and the achievement of functionality and quality goals are becoming crucial for achieving a company’s business goals. In today’s software development organizations, technologies are employed that frequently lack sufficient evidence regarding their suitability, their limits, qualities, costs, and inherent risks. This paper presents ongoing research towards the development of a decision support system that aims at improving software engineering technology selection by software managers. To develop such a system, a multiple-step requirements analysis, consisting of a literature survey, a pilot study amongst research managers, and the analysis of additional use cases, was performed. The focus of this paper is on presenting and discussing the results of this three-step requirements analysis process.