Software development with minimum effort has become a challenging task for the software developers. Software effort may be defined as the prediction process of the effort required to develop any software. Many software effort estimation models have been developed in the past, but it is observed that none of them can be applied successfully in all kinds of projects in different environments that raise the problem of the software effort estimation model selection. To select the suitable software effort estimation model, many conflicting selection criteria must be considered in the decision process. The present study emphasizes on the development of a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach by integrating Fuzzy Set Theory and Weighted Distance Based Approximation. To show the consistency of the proposed approach, methodology validation is also performed by making comparison with existing methodologies and to check the criticality of the selection criterion, sensitivity analysis is also performed.

E-learning websites evaluation and selection is extremely important for the establishment of ef-fective E-learning. The E-learning website selection has crucial importance for the educational sector. The selection of E-learning website problem is generally considered as a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem which mainly consists of both qualitative and quantitative criteria. The development of an E-learning website mainly depends on the success of the E-learning website selection along with various alternatives. So, for the effective evaluation and se-lection of E-learning websites, a set of selection criteria should be obtained. This paper consists of two steps, the first step is the identification of E-learning website selection criteria, second step provides the linguistic variables against the selection criteria and then fuzzy set theory (FST) is adopted for the calculation of the priority weights of each selection criteria. To show the rela-tive importance of each selection criteria, they ranked according to their global weights.

In today’s scenario, software has become an essential component in all kinds of systems. The size and the complexity of the software increases with a corresponding increase in its functionality, hence leads to the development of the modular software systems. Software developers emphasize on the concept of component based software engineering (CBSE) for the development of modular software systems. The CBSE concept consists of dividing the software into a number of modules; selecting Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) for each module; and finally integrating the modules to develop the final software system. The selection of COTS for any module plays a vital role in software development. To address the problem of selection of COTS, a framework for ranking and selection of various COTS components for any software system based on expert opinion elicitation and fuzzy-based matrix methodology is proposed in this research paper. The selection problem is modeled as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. The evaluation criteria are identified through extensive literature study and the COTS components are ranked based on these identified and selected evaluation criteria using the proposed methods according to the value of a permanent function of their criteria matrices. The methodology is explained through an example and is validated by comparing with an existing method.

There is a tremendous growth of the use of the component based software engineering (CBSE) approach for the development of software systems. The selection of the best suited COTS components which fulfils the necessary requirement for the development of software(s) has become a major challenge for the software developers. The complexity of the optimal selection problem increases with an increase in alternative potential COTS components and the corresponding selection criteria. In this research paper, the problem of ranking and selection of Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) components is modeled as a multi-criteria decision making problem. A ‘Fuzzy Distance Based Approach (FDBA)’ method is proposed for the optimal ranking and selection of DBMS COTS components of an e-payment system based on 14 selection criteria grouped under three major categories i.e. ‘Vendor Capabilities’, ‘Business Issues’ and ‘Cost’. The results of this method are compared with other Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) which is termed as a typical multi-criteria decision making approach. The proposed methodology is explained with an illustrated example.