An empirical study on the implementation and evaluation of a goal-driven software development risk management model

The significance of software is growing everyday as it becomes a major part of enterprise business. Building a quality software product in the shortest possible time to satisfy the global market demand gives an enterprise a competitive advantage. However, uncertainties and risks exist at every stage of a software development project. These can have an extremely high influence on the success of the final software product. Early risk management practice is effective to identify and control such risks and contributes effectively towards the project success. Despite of several risk management approaches being presented in the literature, a detailed guideline that explains where to integrate risk management activities into the software development project is still missing. Moreover, although empirical investigations focus on identifying potential risk factors on software projects, very little effort has been directed towards the evaluation of the overall impact of a risk management method to a software project. This paper contributes towards these two limitations. In particular, we present a Goal-driven Software Development Risk Management Model (GSRM) and its explicit integration into requirements engineering phase and an empirical investigation result of applying GSRM into an on-going software development project. The result clearly shows that when risk factors are beyond the control of the project manager and project environment then it is difficult to control these risks. Project scope affects all dimensions of risk. We conclude that a formal early stage risk management practice is not only provides early warning related to the problems exist in project but also effectively contributes to the overall project success