Risks inside-out

Abstract

Software project mistakes represent a loss of millions of dollars to thousands of companies all around the world. These software projects that somehow ran off course share a common problem: Risks became unmanageable. There are certain number of conjectures we can draw from the high failure rate: Bad management procedures, an inept manager was in charge, managers are not assessing risks, poor or inadequatemethodologies where used, etc. Some of them might apply to some cases, or all, or none, is almost impossible to think in absolute terms when a software project is an ad hoc solution to a given problem. Nevertheless,there is an ongoing effort in the knowledge engineering (KE) community to isolate risk factors, and provide remedies for runaway projects, unfortunately, we are not there yet. This work aims to express some general conclusions for risk assessment of software projects, particularly, but notlimited to, those involving knowledge acquisition (KA). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.