Use of Fuzzy Logic in Software Development

The systems and software development industry is characterized by a paradigm of project failure. One of the known contributing causes of these project failures is poor requirements engineering and management, which has been repeatedly and widely discussed and documented. But there are other factors also like poor project management practices, poor design strategy and inefficient testing principles also contributing to project failures. And the root cause of all these factors is the fact that we use classical two-valued logic system for decision making. The output of decision making process is either yes or no in two-valued logic system. The Maxim of Uncertainty in Software Engineering (MUSE) states that uncertainty is inherent and inevitable in software development processes and products. It is a general and abstract statement applicable to many facets of software engineering. The above problems could be easily countered by the Fuzzy logic, because fuzzy logic has ability to deal with uncertainty and multi valued logic e.g. an entity in a problem domain has 0.5 possibility or 0.8 possibility like that to be taken as a class, whereas in classical two valued logic , there is only two possibility values either 0 or 1. So, quantization levels increases from 2 to more than two, consequently the quantization error will reduce and there will be less information loss at early stages of development. Fuzzy logic uses membership functions to incorporate linguistic variables and quantifiers. Fuzzy Logic could also be used in project estimation purposes efficiently by gathering size data on previously developed programs. Fuzzy logic based estimation provides reasonably good estimates where new work is like prior experience. Fuzzy logic concepts could also be used at testing phase of software development. As a rule of thumb we can say if some decision making or human communication involve during development process we can use the concept of fuzzy logic to improve s/w development processes and products.