Research On Project Risk Analysis And Its Supporting Tool Based Software Process

Once a risk of software project occurs in a management process, it will have a positive or a negative impact on the project. And the negative impact will always result in some potential problems even more severe damages to the project effort.This paper proposes a risk analysis approach with its supporting tool for risk management of software projects. In summary, software project is split up into some process units which are going to build a net structure that risks will impact on. Thereafter, it enrolls risks as special elements to link with the units which circulate risk impact through the whole structure. Thus, we can trace these units and elements of the net structure to estimate the occurrence probability, offer some visualization of the consequences for each risk, and we can also prioritize the risks. The approach degrades the complexity of doing risk analysis by using of disintegration features and visualization features, and the approach allows the project manager's perspective to focus on some independent sub-structure and those elements linked. Then we can ascertain the risk impact also in some detail parts; and strengthen the project risk management from both micro and macro view.The approach concentrates on estimation of the risk impact which includes risk consequence and risk occurrence probability. The risk consequence we discuss here includes project cost and project workload, and success probabilities of the project elements. In the approach, the sub-process disintegrated from the whole project is defined as process unit; the item that belongs to the units is defined as element; and the link between unit and element creates the whole network of project process. The risks participate in project process network as special elements which make it possible to analyze risk consequence and risk occurrence probability based on the property data of the whole net structure.This paper also involves in software design and software development of the supporting tool to achieve risk impact calculation and automatic drawing for visualization expression. We start with the business model to define the software detail operation step and application flow of the tool; do requirements modeling by the method of use case driven; provide detail use case diagrams and use case operation specifications of the supporting tool; offer software architecture design based on the requirements. Then we achieve some sequence diagrams and state charts of the system use case; finish software development detail design. Finally we finish coding work of the software with C# programming language.Comparing with other tools of risk analysis, our tool has higher level visualization; it is easier to be applied and maintained; it is more available for different scales; it costs less, and it can be adjusted dynamically.The project risk analysis method and its supporting tool that proposed in this paper have been applied in a software company for initial implementation. We obtained some reference data and some experience with using the method and its tool in two software projects. Practice has shown that they can significantly improve the efficiency of software project risk analysis.