Towards the Selection of Prototypes for Educational Tools: A Hybrid Model in the Verbal Decision Analysis

Aiming to attend the growing demand for professionals with knowledge about software processes, this paper presents ideas for creating educational tools that supports its teaching. The paper defines six options of educational tools prototypes and illustrates the research of preferences elicitation in the application of a hybrid method using ORCLASS and PACOM Decision Support Systems (DSS) from Verbal Decision Analysis (VDA) framework to classify and rank the prototypes according to the decision maker preferences. The application with prototypes was chosen because the software engineering is an area that allows a wide research in the preferences elicitation process. The research results show that, the adoption of qualitative methods of decision support can benefit significantly the selection of the interface aiming to use the selected interface from the approved group and ranked for future development of real educational tools applications.