-Managing risks in real-world software projects is of paramount importance. A significant class of such risks is related to the engineering of requirements, commonly involving the presentation and analysis of risk management arguments from both software engineers and clients involved in collaborative debates. In this work, drawing inspiration from argumentation theory in Artificial Intelligence, we introduce a number of "argumentation schemes" and associated "critical questions" to support such discussions. In doing so, we propose schemes related to risks due to excessive numbers of requirements; inadequate client representatives and poor understanding of client needs; incorrect, incomplete and conflicting requirements, and complex and non-traceable requirements. We also present a case study where the developed schemes were used to support the discussion of requirement risks in the context of a research and prototyping software project for the Brazilian Army.

Managing risks in real-world software projects is of paramount importance. A significant class of such risks is related to the engineering of requirements, commonly involving the presentation and analysis of risk management arguments from both software engineers and clients involved in collaborative debates. In this work, drawing inspiration from argumentation theory in Artificial Intelligence, we introduce a number of “argumentation schemes” and associated “critical questions” to support such discussions. In doing so, we propose schemes related to risks due to excessive numbers of requirements; inadequate client representatives and poor understanding of client needs; incorrect, incomplete and conflicting requirements; complex and non-traceable requirements; non-stable requirements; and low quality requirements. We also discuss a case study and two experiments where the developed schemes supported the discussion of requirement risks in software projects. The overall results of these experiments indicate that our schemes are useful in the identification, proposition and analysis of requirement risks, adequately supporting debates on requirement risks.

-The engagement of project stakeholders in collaborative debates of risk management has an important contribution to software projects. To promote the identification, (re)use and critical analysis of stakeholders' arguments in these debates, this paper lays out a knowledge engineering process for the development of "argumentation schemes" for risk management. This process covers activities of identification, interpretation and causal-and-effect analysis of typical risk statements. From such risk management information and reusing generalized argumentation templates from argumentation catalogues discussed in the field of Artificial Intelligence, the process leads to the specification, generalization, validation and indexing of the developed schemes. As implemented in our project, a web-based system to support the execution of these development activities allows the recording of these schemes in a semi-structured representation format. An argumentation scheme for risks of non-stable requirements is presented so as to show the reusable argumentation artifacts that can be produced when our development process is followed.