A Common Terminology for Software Risk Management

Abstract

In order to improve and sustain their competitiveness over time, organisations nowadays need to undertake different initiatives to adopt frameworks, models and standards that will allow them to align and improve their business processes. In spite of these efforts, organisations may still encounter governance and management problems. This is where Risk Management (RM) can play a major role, since its purpose is to contribute to the creation and preservation of value in the context of the organisation's processes. RM is a complex and subjective activity that requires experience and a high level of knowledge about risks, and it is for this reason that standardisation institutions and researchers have made great efforts to define initiatives to overcome these challenges. However, the RM field nevertheless presents a lack of uniformity in its terms and concepts, due to the different contexts and scopes of application, a situation that can generate ambiguities and misunderstandings. To address these issues, this paper aims to present an ontology called SRMO (Software Risk Management Ontology), which seeks to unify the terms and concepts associated with RM and provide an integrated and holistic view of risk. In doing so, the Pipeline framework has been applied in order to assure and verify the quality of the proposed ontology, and it has been implemented in Protégé and validated by means of competency questions. Three application scenarios of this ontology demonstrating their usefulness in the software engineering field are presented in this paper. We believe that this ontology can be useful for organisations that are interested in: (i) establishing an RM strategy from an integrated approach, (ii) defining the elements that help to identify risks and the criteria that support decision-making in risk assessment, and (iii) helping the involved stakeholders during the process of risk management.