Abstract:
Software requirements play a pivotal role in the planning of a software project and they
are a key input to project size and effort estimation processes. The increasing dependence
of all aspects of life on software products has made the success of software projects more
critical. It has become a challenge to predict software project risks as early as possible
and create contingency plans to overcome or mitigate future risks. Furthermore, the risk
is different for different projects. Currently, there is no consensus within the software
development community on requirement properties to determine the cause of risk in
software projects.
There is a need for a systematic analysis that combines risk prediction factors, risk
prediction methods, risk datasets, and their analysis in a single framework. This research
aims to identify requirement risk attributes and project success factors that are later on
validated using SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) to analyze that requirement risk
properties can be linked to software risks. Mainly, the purpose of conducting a systematic
mapping study (SMS) is to find out the properties of requirements that are the major cause
of risk occurring in software projects.
Later, we designed a survey based on the requirement properties extracted from SMS to
find out risk prediction practices used by software professionals and their views related
to these factors in the Pakistani software industry. The proposed SMS and survey in the
Pakistani industry based on the risk prediction process using SEM is missing in the
published research. That’s why, this research will help project managers to understand,
initiate and evaluate the risk prediction process in their software development
organizations. Additionally, it will help us to identify the gap between research on risk
prediction and actual practices in the software industry.
