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TopRisk Management
Risk management is increasingly seen as one of the main jobs of project managers. It involves anticipating risks that might affect the project schedule or the software quality of the software being developed and taking measures to avoid or mitigate the impacts arising from those risks (Hall, 1998; Ould, 1999) apud (Sommerville, 2006). So we can understand risk as an unwanted event that has negative consequences (Pfleeger & Atlee, 2009).
In a software project, various risks may exist and they are best understood if we divide them in three categories (Sommerville, 2006): Project Risks, which affect the project schedule or resources; Product Risks, which affect the quality or performance of the software being developed; Business Risks, which affect the software developing or procured by organization. Therefore we can identify particular risk implications in the projects and plan how to deal with these risks if they will or may occur.
Project managers are subject to uncertainties related to the difficulty of defining requirements, time and resources estimating or even to organizational or customer needs changes. To avoid that these risks jeopardize the project, the manager must anticipate them, understand their impact and take the appropriate action. This process consists of four steps (Sommerville, 2006): 1) Risk Identification, in which possible project, product and business risks are identified; 2) Risk Analysis, in which the likelihood and consequences of these risks are assessed; 3) Risk Planning, in which plans to address the risk by avoiding it or minimizing its effects on the project are drawn up; and 4) Risk Monitoring, in which the risk is constantly assessed and plans for risk mitigation are revised as more information about the risk becomes available.