Introducing professional issues into project management modules

Students frequently relegate risk analysis to the later stages of development-testing their code. The precoding risks they may address involve accurate requirements elicitation and cohesive system design. They fail to see their professional obligations to address broader impacts of the system both for the client and for society. They see requirements analysis as a one-way street-merely getting information from the client. This limited approach to risk analysis is inadequate. It does not identify critical project risks beyond issues of budget, schedule and function. Focus on correctly capturing the customer´s desired system functionality does not take into account the system´s impact on a broad range of system stakeholders. The software development impact statement (SoDIS) process facilitates the early identification of these additional types of project risks and helps students exercise their professional judgment in the early stages of software development and management. This pre-audit process of the early stages of software development has been used successfully internationally to help students take a broader approach to risk analysis and provide them with practice discovering risks. After a brief discussion of the SoDIS process, samples of its classroom applications in software project management classes, software engineering classes and Masters Classes are presented.