Prioritizing and Fulfilling Quality Attributes for Virtual Lab Development through Application of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and Software Development Guidelines

Malaysian Journal of Computer Science

Lee Sai Peck¹  Chong Chun Yong¹  T.C.Ling¹ 

关键词: quality attributes;    priority assessment;    fuzzy analytic hierarchy process;    software development guideline;    virtual lab;   

DOI  :  

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of Malaya * Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology

【 摘 要 】

The evolution in pedagogy and research has introduced new requirements in the educational sector. Ondemandcomputing resource provisioning, often referred as virtual lab, is one of the requirements in greatdemand. Most current virtual lab systems are proprietary and thus their detailed software architectures are notaccessible to developers. The lack of transparency in virtual lab architecture makes it hard for educationalinstitutions to perform experimental testing and prototyping on these systems to determine their effectiveness inmeeting certain service level requirements. To lead to an effective virtual lab development, it is important toensure that all non-functional requirements, or commonly known as quality attributes, stated in the service levelagreement (SLA) are realizable in the required order of priority. While a quality attribute can be achieved byapplying one or more software development guidelines, software development guidelines may have differenteffects on different quality attributes and may also conflict with one another. In addition, priority assessment ofthe quality attributes are needed in order to focus on the higher priority ones while ensuring that the bareminimum expectation of the remaining ones are attainable. This paper aims to apply fuzzy Analytic HierarchyProcess (AHP) during the pre-negotiation stage of SLA to identify quality attributes and rank them based ontheir priorities. Based on the results, a set of suitable development guidelines are chosen to help realize andachieve the prioritized quality attributes in the virtual lab architecture, thus paving a way to facilitatearchitecture evaluation. The application of fuzzy AHP in our experiment has shown that stakeholders rankedreliability, usability, efficiency, security, maintainability, and portability in decreasing order of priority, basedon which a set of suitable, non-conflicting software development guidelines were determined. The final resultcan provide a promising reference model for better understanding of virtual lab in the educational sector.

【 授权许可】

Unknown