Prioritizing CRC cards as a simple design tool in extreme programming

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied in many fields and especially to complex engineering problems and applications. The AHP is capable of structuring decision problems and finding mathematically determined judgments built on knowledge and experience. This suggests that AHP should prove useful in agile software development where complex decisions occur routinely. In this paper, the AHP is used to prioritize Class Responsibility Collaboration (CRC) cards in Extreme Programming (XP) design activity. XP encourages the simplicity in design that takes less time to accomplish than more complex approaches. The CRC cards tool has been proved to effectively achieve this purpose. Moreover, prioritizing CRC cards helps the XP team to implement the most valuable class to design.