AHP/ANP approach for optimizing decision making in software development

Nowadays, every company has to make decisions in order to carry out their work, but most of the time these decisions are based on subjective feelings and can have a positive or negative impact on the revenue of these companies, and many doubts could come out as of why certain decisions were made. For this, we want to test if the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Analytical Network Process (ANP) can help to prioritize the decisions in a more straightforward way (according to their importance) in order to increase the transparency of the decisions that are made. AHP is a decision-making approach that achieves pairwise comparisons among criteria (or decisions, in the context of this research), and ANP is another approach used for measuring tangible and intangible factors in a multi-criteria decision analysis. However, since there was no dependency amongst any decisions or priorities ranked by the participants, we limited our case study to AHP only. The purpose of adding ANP to the research was to study both the methods simultaneously and understand the concepts thoroughly.Our research was focused on a company named Sinch Sweden AB, in which we observed the context of decision-making and tested the short-term effects of AHP in one team as part of a case study.After several questionnaires, interviews and our case study, we concluded that, with the help of AHP/ANP, the participants could have a better understanding of the importance of some decisions against others, notice inconsistencies in their judgements and we could also observe an increase in transparency