Towards efficient risk-identification in risk-driven development processes

Today's software projects face an environment of continuous change and evolution. In order to handle evolution in development environments (e.g., requirements, technology) effectively, over the last decades well-established development processes have been adapted significantly and new process models have been proposed. For example, there is a wide range of agile processes which are risk-driven and which not only handle but embrace frequent change. However, agile and risk-driven processes still suffer from a lack of support for automatic and generic identification of certain risks. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic, finegrained identification of high-risk development artifacts and high-risk-areas within those artifacts that is easy to integrate with common development processes. The approach has been implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype. First validation results indicate that the approach is highly scalable and provides continuous feedback about a development project's technical risks.