Semi-automated Tool Recommender for Software Development Processes

Application life-cycle management (ALM) tools are key for streamlining software development processes. However, small and medium development companies (SMBs) cannot afford to carry out time- and people-intensive tool evaluations for each project, and instead adopt fixed toolsets, thus losing flexibility. To simplify the tool selection process, this article proposes formalizing tool selection as a set of Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problem, one for each ALM domain. Our domain-parametric recommender takes as inputs a domain, a process definition, and a set of tool evaluation criteria, and yields a ranked list of tools. The approach has been prototyped with the Testing domain and evaluated using a real process and project; the recommendations generated by our approach were quite similar to those of three Testing experts. Pending further evaluation, these results suggest that our approach can generate project-specific tool recommendations with results comparable to those of experts, but at a fraction of the cost.