Quantitative Risk Assessment for Software Engineering: A Case Study. H. A. Ahmad, T. Berhanu, and E. Orhun; Tuskegee University and Troy State University Montgomery
Conventionally qualitative risk assessment has been employed to determine the risk of failure for software engineering projects. There have been various methodologies in place in this regard. However, there are numbers of associated components involved in the software engineering and they varied from people to process to project to product. Further more there are different factors and constraints associated with each of these components, simple qualitative assessment may not be appropriate to determine the cumulative risk objectively. The present study is focused on the use of quantitative approach in a software engineering project that focused on the development of a web-based learning system. The project was composed of five teams: program manager; project manager; configuration manager; risk manager; and quality assurance manager. The risks associated within each team bound were identified and the corresponding probability distributions for each of these risks were determined based on the expert opinion. The total risk of each team in turn helps determine the risk for each component, i.e., people, project, process, and product. Cumulative risk of the project failure was determined by combining the component risk. Base line model revealed a high probability of project failure due to project complexity, which was 37%.
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