A risk taxonomy proposal for software maintenance

There can be no doubt that risk management is an important activity in the software engineering area. One proof of this is the large body of work existing in this area. However, when one takes a closer look at it, one perceives that almost all this work is concerned with risk management for software development projects. The literature on risk management for software maintenance is much scarcer. On the other hand, software maintenance projects do present specificities that imply they offer different risks than development. This suggests that maintenance projects could greatly benefit from better risk management tools. One step in this direction would be to help identifying potential risk factors at the beginning of a maintenance project. For this, we propose taxonomy of possible risks for software management projects. The ontology was created from: i) an extensive survey of risk management literature, to list known risk factors for software development; and, ii) an extensive survey of maintenance literature, to list known problems that may occur during maintenance.