Lightweight Risk Mitigation for Software Development Projects Using Repository Mining

Abstract

Many software projects fail to deliver their needed results on-time and on-budget. There are a variety of reasons why this may occur. For some of these reasons (notably deterioration of the codebase), corrective action is often difficult to cost-justify or to implement efficiently in practice. To address this, an approach of lightweight risk mitigation is proposed: mine risk data from configuration management and defect tracking systems, integrate this data with project-cost data in a flexible dashboard, and facilitate strategic refactoring with semi-custom transforms where necessary. This prescriptive information would simultaneously help the project manager to cost-justify repair efforts and lowers the cost of finding and fixing hot spots.