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Software companies are now using Distributed Agile Development (DAD) in order to create high quality solutions, which aligns with the business priorities of lesser time and cost. Although, DAD is beneficial, there are significant risks involved in such projects. In order to minimize the adverse effect of risks on DAD projects, it is imperative to understand, how the risks impact the project performance goals including ‘Time’, ‘Cost’ and ‘Quality’. In this paper we present a goal driven approach for managing risks in DAD projects. This approach of risk management will enable project managers to identify the most important risks with respect to the goal to be achieved and focus on managing those risks first. The study shows that if ‘Time’ is a considered goal for a DAD project, the most important risks that would need consideration are related to requirement management, architecture changes and coordination issues between stakeholders. Similarly, if ‘Quality’ is the primary performance goal in a DAD project, it would be necessary to first deal with risks related to internal and external communication in the organization, team collaboration and requirement documentation availability. The awareness of top ranking risk factors that impact a particular project goal will assist the projects managers to control the risks in a way that the desired project goals can be achieved.

As the software system changes, the design of the software deteriorates hence reducing the quality of the system. This paper presents a case study in which an inventory application is considered and efforts are made to improve the quality of the system by refactoring. The code is an open source application namely "Inventor Deluxe v 1.03", which was first, assessed using the tool Metrics 1.3.6 (an Eclipse Plug-in). The code was then refactored and three more versions were built. At the end of creation of every version the code was assessed to find the improvement in the quality. The results obtained after measuring various metrics helped in tracing the spots in the code, which requires further improvement and hence can be refactored. Most of the refactoring was done manually with little tool support. Finally, a trend was found which shows, that average complexity and size of the code reduces with refactoring -based development, which helps to make the software more maintainable. Thus, although refactoring is time consuming and a labor-intensive work, it has a positive impact on the software quality.