Software risk management through independent verification and validation
John R. Callahan, Tong Zhou, R. Wood · 1995
project, risk can be reduced if errors and other discrepancies are found as early as possible in the software development life cycle. Many studies have shown that undetected errors in a project will increase the likelihood of failures in later life cycle phases when the cost to fix them increases by orders of magnitude. Software project managers need tools to estimate and track project goals in a continuous fashion before, during, and after development of a system. In addition, they need an ability to compare the current project status with past project profiles to validate management intuition, identify problems, and then direct appropriate resources to the sources of problems. This paper describes a measurement-based approach to calculating the risk inherent in meeting project goals that leverages past project metrics and existing estimation and tracking models. We introduce the IV&V Goal/Questions/Metrics model, explain its use in the software development life cycle, and describe ou...