Investigating technological risks and mitigation strategies in software projects
Emanuel Dantas, Ademar França de Sousa Neto, Dalton Cézane Gomes Valadares, Mirko Perkusich, Felipe Ramos, Hyggo Oliveira de Almeida, Ângelo Perkusich · Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing · 2022
Risks are present in any software project. In particular, technological risks are complex, volatile, and difficult to predict accurately. Despite this, the literature is scarce about such risks. This paper address this gap by identifying technological risk factors and strategies to mitigate them in software projects. We conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews with 25 experts from ten organizations that execute software projects. Participants work with emerging technologies in academia-industry collaboration projects. Our analysis, using grounded theory, led to nine technological risk factors, classified into Research risk or Product risk. Further, for each technological risk, we identified the main mitigation strategy adopted by the practitioners. The results of our study can be used as a catalog to assist organizations in managing technological risks on software projects.