CTHP: Selection for adoption of open-source bioinformatics software based on a customised ISO 25010 quality model, three-way decision and Delphi hierarchy process

Abstract

The ever-growing open-source software tools in different domains increase the difficulty of software selection from the end-users perspective. The process of evaluating, comparing, and selecting open-source solutions is far from trivial. Especially, when additional requirements need to be considered, the existing methodologies will fail to adapt to the new tasks. The objective of this study is to present a solution for dealing with this issue. A novel approach, CTHP, is presented for the evaluation and selection of open-source software in the Bioinformatics domain. First, the ISO 25010 quality model is chosen as the basis. This model is customised according to the special characteristics of the Bioinformatics applications. The customisation is done by extracting the quality factors from the Bioinformatics applications, weighting these factors from the viewpoints of both developers and end-users, and adding them to the model. After that, Three-way Decision and Delphi Hierarchy Process are integrated to assist in the selection for adoption. Finally, as a case study, the proposed approach is applied to assist the decision-making process of two popular natural language processing frameworks in the Bioinformatics area. Our study is a valuable contribution since it provides a systematic way to document the decision-making process and help the researchers and practitioners of Bioinformatics to make better decisions among the alternatives.