A Practical Approach to Quantifying Risk Evaluation Results

Risk management is one of the most critical and most difficult aspects of software project management. There is a vast literature documenting approaches and tools that address risk assessment and mitigation. In this paper, "hard" and "soft" classifications are introduced, that are basled on either the mathematical rigor describing the development of the model/tool or the mathematical rigor expected from the user during the use of the model/tool. In the next step benefits and liabilities of the various approaches are compared. The purpose of this analysis is to provide a foundation for a simple, practical approach to risk analysis, which combines the identified benefits, without suffering from the known liabilities. The solution presented here is a combination of the SEUSRE (Software Engineering Institute/Software Risk Evaluation) method, and COCOMO (Constructive Cost Model) 11, the popular parametric software cost model and estimation tool.