SEI Report on Risk Themes Releases

The folks at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) have released a technical report entitled "Risk Themes Discovered Through Architecture Evaluations".

Written by Len Bass, Robert Nord, William Wood, and David Zubrow, the report analyzes the output of 18 evaluations conducted using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) developed by the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. The goal of the analysis was to find patterns in the risk themes identified during those evaluations. The major results are:

• A categorization of risk themes
• The observation that twice as many risk themes are risks of "omission" as are risks of "commission".
• A failure to find a relationship between the business/mission goals of a system and the risk themes revealed during an ATAM evaluation of that system.
• A failure to find a relationship between the domain of a system being evaluated and the risk themes associated with the development of that system.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:50 AM  Permalink