Using Bayesian Networks to Support Managing Technological Risk on Software Projects

Abstract

Risk management is essential in software project management. It includes activities such as identifying, measuring and monitoring risks. The literature presents different approaches to support software risk management. In particular, the researchers popularly used Bayesian Networks because they can be learned from data or elicited from domain experts. Even though the literature presents many Bayesian networks (BN) for software risk management, none focus on technological risk factors. Given this, this paper presents a BN for managing risks of software projects and the results of a static validation performed through a focus group with eight practitioners. As a result, the practitioners agreed that our proposed to manage technological risks of software projects using BN is valuable and easy to use. Given the successful results, we concluded that the proposed solution is promising.