Balancing Opportunities and Risks in Component-Based Software Development

The increasingly rapid change in information technology makes it essential for software development projects to continuously monitor and adapt to new sources of opportunity and risk. Software projects and organizations can increase their success rates in software development by better assessing and balancing their opportunities and risks. The authors summarize the incremental commitment model (ICM), a process framework for improved project monitoring and decision making based on balancing opportunities and risks. They give an example of how the ICM framework can improve component-based development choices based on assessment of opportunities and risks. They show how different opportunistic solutions result from different stakeholder value propositions. They elaborate on the risks involved in architectural mismatches among components, present a tool called the Integration Studio (iStudio) that enables projects to assess the most common sources of architectural mismatch between components. Finally, they present representative examples of its use.