The Use of Analytic Hierarchy Process for Software Development Method Selection: A Perspective of e-Government in Indonesia

Information Technology (IT) has played an important role at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia (Kemlu). It provides e-government services to cut long bureaucracy and achieve priorities in foreign policies. As the organization grows, there are needs to develop new software in this e-government context. In general, it requires a software development standard procedure to meet software quality assurance. In Kemlu the standard procedure in software development becomes more critical due to frequent changes among IT team members. It is the nature of this organization to send their staffs to foreign countries for several years. Then they are back to home country for another couple of years, and get ready for their next assignments abroad. A fundamental step in a software development standard procedure is determining the most suitable software development method. However, there was lack of investigation for this selection. To address this problem, a study using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is conducted. The factor variables are personnel, requirements, applications, organizations, businesses, operations, and technology. The alternatives of software development methods are Waterfall, Incremental, Prototyping, Extreme Programming, Scrum, and Rational Unified Process. The results show that Prototyping is the fittest software development method for Kemlu.