Risk analysis in software development project with owners and contractors

Risk analysis is a set of techniques used to investigate problems created by uncertainty and to assess their effects. Today it is used in many areas, especially where safety is important. Now the project management in the area of IT (information technology) is becoming hot topic. And the risk problems in IT projects, especially in software development projects become more and more concentrated in software project management. So risk analysis in the area of software development project becomes increasingly important. This work analyses systematically the characteristics of project management for software itself, then the paper analyses the risk of software development projects in the following two aspects: one for owners and another for contractors. To owners the paper identifies and analyses the risk in software development projects according to lifecycle of a project. To contractors the paper identifies and assesses the risk of managing software development project on the basis of investigation of software development project in the IT enterprises of China. Some conclusions are obtained with the statistical analysis of this questionnaire-data by SPSS (statistics package for social science).