A decision model for programming language ecosystem selection: Seven industry case studies

Siamak Farshidi*, Slinger Jansen, Mahdi Deldar

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    Abstract

    Context: Software development is a continuous decision-making process that mainly relies on the software engineer's experience and intuition. One of the essential decisions in the early stages of the process is selecting the best fitting programming language ecosystem based on the project requirements. A significant number of criteria, such as developer availability and consistent documentation, in addition to the number of available options in the market, lead to a challenging decision-making process. As the selection of programming language ecosystems depends on the application to be developed and its environment, a decision model is required to analyze the selection problem using systematic identification and evaluation of potential alternatives for a development project. Method: Recently, we introduced a framework to build decision models for technology selection problems in software production. Furthermore, we designed and implemented a decision support system that uses such decision models to support software engineers with their decision-making problems. This study presents a decision model based on the framework for the programming language ecosystem selection problem. Results: The decision model has been evaluated through seven real-world case studies at seven software development companies. The case study participants declared that the approach provides significantly more insight into the programming language ecosystem selection process and decreases the decision-making process's time and cost. Conclusion: With the decision model, software engineers can more rapidly evaluate and select programming language ecosystems. Having the knowledge in the decision model readily available supports software engineers in making more efficient and effective decisions that meet their requirements and priorities. Furthermore, such reusable knowledge can be employed by other researchers to develop new concepts and solutions for future challenges.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number106640
    Pages (from-to)1-20
    JournalInformation and Software Technology
    Volume139
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    We thank the twelve experts that participated in this research. Furthermore, we thank the excellent support we have received from the journal editors and reviewers. This work is part of AMUSE Project and funded by NWO [project number 628.006.001 ].

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2021 The Authors

    Funding

    We thank the twelve experts that participated in this research. Furthermore, we thank the excellent support we have received from the journal editors and reviewers. This work is part of AMUSE Project and funded by NWO [project number 628.006.001 ].

    Keywords

    • Decision model
    • Decision support system
    • Industry case study
    • Multi-criteria decision-making
    • Programming language ecosystem selection
    • Software production

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