Effecitve Risk Management in Softwatre Development Utilizing Different Methodologies - Dissertation Example

Risks exist throughout the lifecycle, as it can be seen, some risks on budgeting, scheduling or others might be the reason for failure in project management. Unfortunate, there only 30% of the investigated projects were applying risk analysis and monitoring in their projects. It is easily assumed that ineffective risk management, or even lack of risk identification, risk analysis and risk mitigation in project life-cycle are the rational reason for being failure ((Baccarini; Salm and Love, 2004).

Thus, an efficient risk management process for the project becomes more and more essential. 1.1.1 Background and Research scope Risk is usually defined to be a possibility which is predictable and avoidable (Boehm, 1989; Charette, 1989). Royer (2002) presents that each organization is supposed to set up their own risk categories checklist according to the different needs and requirement. Generally, risk management process, accorded to the PMBOK and CMMI principles, is identifying, analysing, monitoring and controlling.

In different types of software projects, the ability for mitigating risks might be different because a wide range of methodologies contribute to developing software project such as waterfall model, agile methodologies, spiral model, and V model. Meanwhile, the procedure of risk management can be different as well. In this research, effective risk management will be presented along with diversified development models which are used widely nowadays. Regardless of different categories of projects, this research is focus on the most common risks in software project, by discussing on the ability of mitigation of risks and the process of risk management in three types of methodologies, exploring the effectiveness in managing the same kinds of risks in the development life-cycle. 1.1.

2 Hypothesis and Objectives The hypothesis of this research is illustrated as that Waterfall is more effective in planning risk management and Agile methodologies tend to be more efficient in mitigating and monitoring risks because of its flexibility. In order to prove the hypothesis mentioned above, the objectives is designed as follows: 1. Reviewing literature to identify the process of risk management in general software projects. 2. Reviewing literature to identify the typical types of risk in software development projects. 3. Reviewing literature to investigate the functionality of waterfall model in risk management 4.

Reviewing literature to investigate the framework of Agile methodologies in risk management 5. To reveal the influences of the typical types of risks by interview 6. To outline the process of risk management in the authentic project risk management 7. To compare the effectiveness of different methodologies in risk management based on the process and managing typical types of risks. 8. By comparing the successful and unsuccessful project utilizing the same development method, discover the advantage and disadvantage of the method. 9. By comparing the successful project utilizing different approaches, discovering the effectiveness in risk management of the methodologies. 1.2 Research Method A mixed-method research study takes advantage of the differences between qualitative and quantitative research techniques.

In particular, in a purely qualitative study, it is difficult to have a large sample size, as