Every software project by its inherent nature is unique and contains significant numbers of uncertainties from various perspectives such as time-to-market, budget and schedule estimation, product deployment or maintenance. If failing to control these uncertainties, it imposes potential risks not only during the development phases but also throughout the life cycle of the product. Software risk management is an effective tool to control these risks and contributes to increase the likelihood of project success. Risk management needs to be integrated as early as possible from a holistic perspective into the development. However a comprehensive risk management practice is not always possible due to resource problems, more emphasize on budget and schedule constraints and difficulties to concretely estimate the benefit of risk management.This thesis proposes a Goal-driven Software Development Risk Management Model (GSRM) that explicitly integrates into the requirements engineering phase. The integration provides an early warning of potential problems so that both preventive and corrective actions can be undertaken to avoid the causes of project failure. The framework is comprised of four layers, i.e., goal, obstacle, assessment and treatment, that support the identification, assessment, treatment and documentation of risks in relation to project-specific goals. GSRM is implemented in active on-going software development projects to empirically evaluate its usefulness, particular advantages and limitations in an industrial context. The results show that goaldriven approach is suitable for risk management and risk management is well integrated into requirements engineering phase. It is not always necessary to rank budget and schedule related goals and risk factors at the highest priority for risk management. At the early stage of the project risk factors related to estimation, project management, project scope, requirements, change management and human (i.e. customer/user and practitioner) and at the later stage risk factors related to user satisfaction and product usage are more frequent and severely affect meeting the project goals. If project risk factors are beyond the control of a project manager and project development environment, it is difficult to control the risks. The results conclude that early risk management practice is necessary and GSRM contributes to this direction for a successful project outcome.
ZusammenfassungJedes Software-Entwicklungsprojekt ist einzigartig und geprägt von schwer planbaren Einflussfaktoren, wie time-to-market oder Budget, aber auch von Einflüssen resultierend aus der Integration und der Wartung. Die Beherrschung dieser Einflussgrößen ist unabdingbar für die Minimierung der Risiken während der Entwicklung als auch während des gesamtem Software-Lebenszyklus.