Analytical Hierarchy Process for choosing platform

The objective is to choose type of development for mobile application that will fits client’s needs.

During the interview Ivan has to clarify criteria and their weights. Also he has to warn client about such cross-platform apps features as no access to inner resources and phone services, working only via the Internet and less smooth user experience.

Main client’s criterias are:

1. Covering customers

2. Development costs

3. Development duration

4. Support costs

5. UX friendly (Smooth user interface, working offline/online, free access to inner resources and phone’s service)

Then Ivan asks Vladimir about priorities and importance of criteria and calculates their weight according AHP (see appendix 3).

Before starting judgments to determine the rankings of criteria, it is necessary to determine the linguistic variables, that the experts are used for evaluation.

9 – extremely preferred

8 – very strong to extremely preferred

7 – very strongly preferred

6 – strongly to very preferred

5 – strongly preferred

4 – moderately to strong preferred

3 – moderately preferred

2 – equal to moderately preferred

1 – equally preferred

OPM contain information about pairwise comparison of each criteria over another in term of preference.

Normalized overall preference matrix

Next step, we are assuming an impact of each of the alternatives to the decision making process of choosing the best approach for developing

Normalized matrix

Support cost

Normalized matrix

Normalized matrix

UX

Normalized matrix

Result

AHP shows that cross-platform development fits the most. This can be explained by the fact that cross-platform limitations are not critical for the client.

Conclusions

The aim of this work was to choose platform and type of development that fit client’s and company’s needs the most. Only after huge communication work we could begin to apply Analytic Hierarchy Process and Cause-loop-diagrams. There were introduced five criteria: covering customers, development costs, development duration, support costs and UX friendly. As a result AHP and CLD gave us new portion of information and now we can conclude that cross-platform development for iOS and Android platform is most preferable for client and company.

In conclusion, it could be said that AHP and CLD are useful tools for pre project analysis when decision has to be made and always there are several complex alternatives. But the result depends on how carefully a situation was analyzed.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 983