A lightweight technique for assessing risks in requirements analysis

Boness, Kenneth Duncan; Finkelstein, Anthony; Harrison, Rachel

doi:10.1049/iet-sen:20070068

Cited by 18 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Previously we have reported on a technique for assessing risks during requirements analysis [2]. During subsequent case studies on real-world systems we came to the realisation that any method intended for use in the real-world has to be as simple and practical as possible if it is to have any hope of being adopted by industry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…During subsequent case studies on real-world systems we came to the realisation that any method intended for use in the real-world has to be as simple and practical as possible if it is to have any hope of being adopted by industry. The new method we describe in this paper uses a simplified form of goal responsibility modelling [27] and replaces the probabilistic risk metrics of [2] with confidence assessments performed by experts using an ordinal scale. This is an important improvement because the probabilistic risk metrics used previously implied a level of precision which could not be guaranteed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The method was validated by retrospectively applying it to a case study which we had assessed previously [2]. The case study consisted of a medium-sized project provided by an Administrative Division of University College London.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis

Boness

Finkelstein

Harrison

2011

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis

Boness

Finkelstein

Harrison

2011

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…However details to integrate risk management activities into software project is still missing. Some works consider risk management during requirements engineering [Bor05,BFH08] and software design [VM04]. But in case of considering risk management activities into software design, counter measures may introduce revision of the whole design or alteration of the elicited system requirements and related artifacts.…”

Section: Summary Of the Current Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This may also pose additional problems later on depending on the competence and ability of developers for late discovered risks, mistakes of the requirements or inconsistent design and may also end with passive customer/user involvement. Some recent works have tackled the problem of considering risks in the early phase of system development [AG07,BFH08,vL09]. However the focus is more on the requirement related problems rather than the holistic software development risk perspective.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software development risk management model

Islam

2009

Proceedings of the Doctoral Symposium for ESEC/FSE on Doctoral Symposium

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Every software project by its inherent nature is unique and contains significant numbers of uncertainties from various perspectives such as time-to-market, budget and schedule estimation, product deployment or maintenance. If failing to control these uncertainties, it imposes potential risks not only during the development phases but also throughout the life cycle of the product. Software risk management is an effective tool to control these risks and contributes to increase the likelihood of project success. Risk management needs to be integrated as early as possible from a holistic perspective into the development. However a comprehensive risk management practice is not always possible due to resource problems, more emphasize on budget and schedule constraints and difficulties to concretely estimate the benefit of risk management.This thesis proposes a Goal-driven Software Development Risk Management Model (GSRM) that explicitly integrates into the requirements engineering phase. The integration provides an early warning of potential problems so that both preventive and corrective actions can be undertaken to avoid the causes of project failure. The framework is comprised of four layers, i.e., goal, obstacle, assessment and treatment, that support the identification, assessment, treatment and documentation of risks in relation to project-specific goals. GSRM is implemented in active on-going software development projects to empirically evaluate its usefulness, particular advantages and limitations in an industrial context. The results show that goaldriven approach is suitable for risk management and risk management is well integrated into requirements engineering phase. It is not always necessary to rank budget and schedule related goals and risk factors at the highest priority for risk management. At the early stage of the project risk factors related to estimation, project management, project scope, requirements, change management and human (i.e. customer/user and practitioner) and at the later stage risk factors related to user satisfaction and product usage are more frequent and severely affect meeting the project goals. If project risk factors are beyond the control of a project manager and project development environment, it is difficult to control the risks. The results conclude that early risk management practice is necessary and GSRM contributes to this direction for a successful project outcome. ZusammenfassungJedes Software-Entwicklungsprojekt ist einzigartig und geprägt von schwer planbaren Einflussfaktoren, wie time-to-market oder Budget, aber auch von Einflüssen resultierend aus der Integration und der Wartung. Die Beherrschung dieser Einflussgrößen ist unabdingbar für die Minimierung der Risiken während der Entwicklung als auch während des gesamtem Software-Lebenszyklus.

show abstract

Requirements-driven evolution of sociotechnical systems via probabilistic reasoning and hill climbing

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sociotechnical systems (STSs) are defined by the interaction between technical systems, like software and machines, and social entities, like humans and organizations. The entities within an STS are autonomous, thus weakly controllable, and the environment where the STS operates is highly dynamic. As a result, the design artifacts that represent the requirements of an STS, such as requirements models, may end up being invalid when the system operates, for the autonomous entities do not comply with the requirements, or the environment changes. In this paper, we present a framework that uses runtime execution data to support the runtime validation of requirements models and to guide the evolution of an STS. We propose two types of evolution: (i) manual: the analyst uses Bayesian inference to discover which assumptions in a requirements model are invalid and manually adjusts the system or its model; and (ii) automated: requirements are iteratively revised by an hill climbing algorithm searching for requirements that maximize the achievement of the stakeholders' objectives. We evaluate the effectiveness of different revision heuristics on a smart traffic simulation applied to an exemplar from the self-adaptive systems literature. The results show that our heuristics, informed by runtime execution data, outperform standard uninformed heuristics, in terms of convergence speed, solution quality, and stability. Moreover, the algorithms show good resilience to noise introduced into the execution data.

show abstract

A lightweight technique for assessing risks in requirements analysis

Cited by 18 publications

References 14 publications

A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis

A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis

Software development risk management model

Requirements-driven evolution of sociotechnical systems via probabilistic reasoning and hill climbing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About