Analysis and Evaluation of Risk Prediction using Software Requirements

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