A Tool for Teaching Risk

Students tend to think optimistically about the software they construct. They believe the software will be defect free, and underestimate apparent risks to the development process. In the Software Enterprise, a 4-course upper division project sequence, student team failures to predict and prevent these risks lead to various problems like schedule delays, frustration, and dissatisfaction from external customer sponsors. The Enterprise uses the IBM Rational Jazz platform, but it does not have a native risk management capability. Instead, project teams were recording risks associated with their projects on paper reports. To facilitate maintaining and managing the risks associated with their projects, we developed a risk management component in the Jazz environment. This component complements Jazz by providing features of the risk management process like risk control and monitoring. The risk management component was used and evaluated by student capstone project teams.