MCDM Approach for Generating and Evaluating Alternatives in Requirement Analysis

Determining user requirements and generating alternative system solutions to meet these requirements are two critical steps in the requirement analysis phase of the system development life cycle. Much of the MIS research in the requirement analysis phase has been devoted to the topic of requirement determination and its verification. Alternative generation and evaluation is left, to a significant degree, to the judgment and expertise of an analyst. This paper proposes a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approach for generating and evaluating alternatives when the user requirements are expressed in terms of certain operational criteria such as time, cost, risk, etc. These alternatives form the basis for the user to make the necessary trade-offs.