Towards an evolutionary software delivery strategy based on soft systems and risk analysis

Abstract

RACE is a requirements engineering method which is currently under development. This paper describes broadly the techniques developed so far, reviews earlier work on how risk analysis might be incorporated in RACE and proposes an extension of the method to include evolutionary delivery of proposed changes derived from the method. Proposed changes arising from RACE are often software related and tend to be radical and so are by nature high risk. Hence, these changes are well suited to evolutionary delivery. A means of deriving an evolutionary delivery plan based on cost-benefit analysis and on a risk assessment of the current system, the proposed system and the development of the proposed system is described.