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The best‐worst method (BWM) is a multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) approach for solving several types of real‐life decision‐making problems. The basic BWM determines the priority order by pairwise comparisons of the best and worst criteria. The strength of the preference assigned via numerical value for linguistic interpretations of relative comparisons ranges from 1 to 9, representing preferences among the criterion. However, the amount of strength is entirely dependent on the choice of the decision‐makers. Though expert's opinions may differ due to various reasons such as incomplete information, lack of knowledge, ambiguity in linguistic terms, and so forth. Therefore, it is highly likely that the expert may provide multiple viewpoints for the preferences values. Thus, this study proposes a novel extension of the BWM named the multi‐choice best‐worst method (MCBWM), dealing with the concept of multiple choices of preference relations to compare the criterion. The MCBWM overcomes the limitation of BWM, where the pairwise preferences in the comparisons are multi‐choice parameters rather than single parametric values. Multiple real‐world MCDM applications are illustrated in experimental studies to show the quality, performance, and applicability of our proposed MCBWM. A detailed comparative analysis of the proposed approach has been done with the well‐known existing decision‐making techniques and their optimal results are compared. The proposed method offers a new direction for the MCDM approaches for solving real‐life problems.

Global software development (GSD) organisations are currently adopting agile frameworks in order to efficiently develop a software product. The main objective of this study is to identify the success factors (SFs), which could possibly have a positive impact on scaling agile practices in a GSD environment and develop their taxonomy based on their prioritisation using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach. This study is conducted in four stages: problem identification and goal of the study (1), identification of SFs and their categorisations (2), validation of the SFs using questionnaire survey (3), and application of AHP to prioritise the SFs and develop the taxonomy of the SFs and their respective categories (4). The results of this study indicated that 'technology' is the most significant category as compared to the other categories of the SFs. Similarly, rich technological infrastructure is identified as a most important factor. Based on the findings of this study, authors can conclude that the contribution of this study is not only limited to development of the taxonomy of the SFs, but also their proper prioritisation by introducing AHP approach, which assists software organisations to scale agile methods effectively in the GSD environment.

Fuzzy goal programming (FGP) is applied to solve fuzzy multi-objective optimization problems. In FGP, the weights are associated with fuzzy goals for the preference among them. However, the hierarchy within the fuzzy goals depends on several uncertain criteria, decided by experts, so the preference relations are not always easy to associate with weight. Therefore, the preference relations are provided by the decision-makers in terms of linguistic relationships, i.e., goal A is slightly or moderately or significantly more important than goal B. Due to the vagueness and ambiguity associated with the linguistic preference relations, intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) are most efficient and suitable to handle them. Thus, in this paper, a new fuzzy goal programming with intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (FGP-IFPR) approach is proposed. In the proposed FGP-IFPR model, an achievement function has been developed via the convex combination of the sum of individual grades of fuzzy objectives and amount of the score function of IFPRs among the fuzzy goals. As an extension, we presented the linear and non-linear, namely, exponential and hyperbolic functions for the intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (IFPRs). A study has been made to compare and analyze the three FGP-IFPR models with intuitionistic fuzzy linear, exponential, and hyperbolic membership and non-membership functions. For solving all three FGP-IFPR models, the solution approach is developed that established the corresponding crisp formulations, and the optimal solution are obtained. The validations of the proposed FGP-IFPR models have been presented with an experimental investigation of a numerical problem and a banking financial statement problem. A newly developed distance measure is applied to compare the efficiency of proposed models. The minimum value of the distance function represents a better and efficient model. Finally, it has been found that for the first illustrative problem considered, the exponential FGP-IFPR model performs best, whereas for the second problem, the hyperbolic FGP-IFPR model performs best and the linear FGP-IFPR model shows worst in both cases.

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