A State-of-the-Practice Survey of Risk Management in Development with Off-the-Shelf Software Components

Authors:
Jingyue Li;Reidar Conradi;Odd Petter Slyngstad;Marco Torchiano;Maurizio Morisio;Christian Bunse
Affiliations:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology;Norwegian University of Science and Technology;Norwegian University of Science and Technology;Politecnico di Torino;Politecnico di Torino, Italy;the International University in Germany
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Year:
2008

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Abstract

An international survey on risk management in software development with OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components is reported upon and discussed. The survey investigated actual risk-management activities and their correlations with the occurrences of typical risks in OTS component-based development. Data from 133 software projects in Norway, Italy, and Germany were collected using a stratified random sample of IT companies. The results show that OTS components normally do not contribute negatively to the quality of the software system as a whole, as what is commonly expected. However, issues such as the underestimation of integration effort and inefficient debugging remain problematic and require further investigation. The results also illustrate several promising effective risk-reduction activities, e.g. putting more effort into learning relevant OTS components, integrating unfamiliar components first, evaluating the quality of candidate OTS components thoroughly, and regularly monitoring the support capability of OTS providers. Five hypotheses are proposed regarding these risk reduction activities. The results also indicate that several other factors, such as project, cultural, and human-social factors, have to be investigated to deal with the possible risks of OTS-based projects thoroughly.