An Expert System Methodology for Planning IT Projects with Hesitant Fuzzy Effort: An Application

Abstract

Delivering the projects on time and in accordance with the customer requirements is a crucial process for almost all software companies due to the budget and schedule constraints. Effective time planning provides optimum usage of all resources (i.e., people, time, budget, etc.). This study presents a new integrated decision support methodology for planning software projects. For this purpose, we identify the most important factors by expert judgments and literature review, find priorities of factors by Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term Pairwise Comparison, and estimate time effort (duration) for the projects, respectively. Subsequently, we develop a hybrid metaheuristic by using the priorities of factors and estimated time efforts of the projects. As an experimental study, we apply this methodology to determine time planning of software projects in a Turkish company. We analyze that the proposed methodology gives very efficient plans with less delayed projects and higher award in comparison with the initial solutions.