One of the important elements in building effective teamwork is team leader selection. In a team, leadership is the most significant role which contributes to the success of a software project. During team leader selection, there are several criteria that should be considered for decision makers. With regard to this problem, selecting team leader can be considered as Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. One of the most popular techniques of MCDM that can be employed in selecting the

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... itable team leader is Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP techniques consists of three key principles which are hierarchy framework, priority analysis and consistency verification. Thus, this paper presents AHP steps to select suitable team leader based on four criteria which are personality type, academic achievement, teamwork experience, and previous programming grade. Result illustrates that AHP technique can assist decision maker to effectively evaluate the alternatives in order to select suitable team leader, particularly for Software Engineering (SE) education community. conducted by Palmer and Summers [13] , it showed that the leadership in undergraduate engineering design teams is critical for the performance of each team. Also they stated that the wrong formation of students in a group can affect other attributes such as communication, confidence, as well as project outcome. During team leader selection, there are several criteria that should be considered for decision makers to select which criteria that suit into which team. With regard to this problem, selecting team leader can be considered as Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem whereby many criteria should be considered in decision making. MCDM is a discipline aimed at supporting decision makers who are faced with making numerous and conflicting evaluations [14] . One of the most popular techniques of MCDM is Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique [15] . AHP is most widely used technique in decision making due to its promising accuracy, simplicity, theoretical robustness, ability to handle both qualitative and quantitative criteria, and more importantly, its ability to measure the consistency of judgment of respondents, It is basically a suitable way for understanding complex problem by using a hierarchical structure [16, [17], [18] . Gibney and Shang [19], pointed out that the AHP technique provides an effective and convenient tool for evaluating personnel and must be incorporated into personnel selection processes in academia field. AHP is a methodology with the broad usage that allows interaction and feedback in multiple criteria decision making systems. It takes into account of quantitative as well as qualitative methods, it combines these two into an empirical enquiry [16] , [17], [20]. This uses a qualitative approach for decomposing unstructured issues into a systematic decision hierarchy. From the quantitative angle, this employs a pair wise comparison for executing the consistency test for validating the responses. AHP has diverse applications, Vaidya and Kumar [21], provided a detailed literature review on AHP applications, over 150 applications were categorized in their study. Categories were identified on the basis of themes as well as the areas of applications. Ho [22] , reviewed the applications of integrated AHP in a similar way, use of AHP combined with other techniques including SWOT, Mathematical Programming and Data Envelopment Analysis between the years 1996-2007. All of these show how versatile and capable AHP is in the decision making process [23] . AHP have been implemented in most of applications related to decision making and is currently used in the subject of evaluation and selection especially in the area of personal, engineering and education [21] . Some applications of AHP in selecting of alternatives for various purposes such as, AHP used in dean selection process in academic field [19] . Garoma and Diriba [24], describe an application of AHP for supplier selection in the banking industry. AHP was also employed for selecting the suitable leadership style [18] . This study was focused on the combination of four criteria which are personality type, teamwork experience, academic achievement and previous programming grade in selecting the most suitable team leader in educational group project because these four criteria can be measured quantitatively which one is the best and can effect on teamwork performance. Past research has shown that personality types have an impact on team performance [25, 26, 27] . Omar, Syed-Abdullah and Hussin [28] , added that the personality types play an important role in determining team performance in software engineering projects. Teamwork experience have significant effect on team performance [12] , [20] , [29] . Chen and Lin [20] , added that teams with more experienced members perform better than those with less experienced members. Moreover, academic achievement play a significant role in determining team performance in software engineering projects [1] . In this study, academic achievement refers to prior Grade Point Average (GPA), it was chosen as one of software team leader selection criteria. On the other hand, Alkadi and Beaubouef [30] , pointed out that the formation of team member especially team leader must have programming skills.