Risk Identification Using Case Based Reasoning in Software Project

摘要

Software project has many uncertain factors and risk management has been recognized as one of key activities for project success. However, much of the present research focuses on finding the relation between risk factors and project outcome. Software project failures are often a result of insufficient and ineffective risk identification process. Many parts of identifying risks are subject to the knowledge and experience of expert and manual activities. Consequently, risk identification process can be time consuming and error prone. To overcome these problems, a mechanism was proposed that uses CBR (Case Based Reasoning) to facilitate the reuse of past experience and lesson learned in similar projects. CBR is useful for extracting risk cases having high similarity with the target project in risk database. For the purpose of supporting the proposed mechanism, a descriptor which characterizes and represents a project is designed and an improved algorithm for comparing project similarity is provided. An illustrative example is presented to show how the proposed mechanism can be applied to the actual projects.