Risk Management and Context in a Collaborative Project Management Environment for Software Development

Many events with uncertain results, named risks, can occur during software development process. These risks and their impacts can be determined from a set of context elements in which the software project is inserted, as well as the software life cycle. In a collaborative projects management environment, risks associated with the collaboration activities are related to the project risks. The Web-based Groupware on Project Management System (WGPMS) is an infrastructure that aims to support the collaborative project activities. This environment has a module (Risys) that provides the intelligent identification and the qualitative analysis of the project risks. However, it does not relate the project risks to those which are associated to the low collaboration rate. Moreover, it does not consider the involved context elements which influence the software development process considering the life cycle phases of the RUP model. The goal of this work is to present the modifications in the Risys in order to enhance the risk management in WGPMS. The proposed solution uses ontology for the context elements representation as well as for the RUP model phases. In addition, it uses taxonomy and a qualitative analysis of the risks. Some simulations which were done in order to evaluate the ontology are presented here.