A Multi-criteria Resource Selection Method for Software Projects Using Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

When planning a software project, we must assign resources to tasks. Resource selection is a fundamental step to resource allocation since we first need to find the most suitable candidates for each task before deciding who will actually perform them. In order to rank available resources, we have to evaluate their skills and define the corresponding selection criteria for the tasks. While being the choice of many approaches, representing skill levels by means of ordinal scales and defining selection criteria using binary operations imply some limitations. Pure mathematical approaches are difficult to model and suffer from a partial loss in meaning in terms of knowledge representation. Fuzzy Logic, as an extension to classical sets and logic, uses linguistic variables and a continuous range of truth values for decision and set membership. It allows handling inherent uncertainties in this process, while hiding the complexity from the final user. In this paper we show how Fuzzy Logic can be applied to the resource selection problem. A prototype was built to demonstrate and evaluate the results.