Task assignment to distributed teams based on a qualitative multi-criteria approach

The high growth of companies in recent years has caused the transformation of local markets into global ones. The software industry is not stranger to this transformation and has been looking for effective ways to work in a distributed scenario. A critical activity in distributed projects concerns the assignment of tasks to remote teams. This is a multicriteria decision-making problem and can be supported by Verbal Decision Analysis approaches. This paper describes an approach based on Verbal Decision Analysis methods to aid decision on factors that influence the assignment of tasks to distrubuted teams. The approach is based on the ORCLASS and ZAPROS III-i methods. The first results showed that factors such as "low turnover rate" and "team maturity" are among those considered more important, and the factors "personal trust", "low labor cost", "cultural similarities" and "time zone" were considered less relevant in DSD context.