How Students Perceive Risk: A Study of Senior Capstone Project Teams

One view of software engineering project management is that it is the portion of a project that is involved with managing tasks, resources, assignments and deadlines. Certainly, many of the daily activities for a software project manager might be categorized in such a way; however, these activities merely serve as surrogates for the principal responsibility of the project manager: risk management. Risk management includes identification, analysis, and mitigation of risks that, should the risks materialize, have the potential for negatively impacting the completion of a project. In this paper we approach the problem of risk management for IT projects from the perspective of the developers, and pursue an understanding of how student developers perceive project risks using Tiwana and Keil\´s "one-minute risk assessment tool". We present the results of a study of perceived project risk for different IT projects completed by more than 50 senior undergraduate students during the 2005/2006 academic year.