A Risk-Based Approach to Strategic Decision-Making for Software Development

In any software system development, the most important strategic decisions are, by definition, those made early in the lifecycle. However, these early lifecycle decisions are generally made in a data-starved environment. The best sources of data are those based on historical information (if the current project is sufficiently similar to past systems), and the judgments of domain experts. At NASA, we have been developing and applying a risk-based model to capture information from domain experts and to study and plan for systems that use advanced technology. Here we describe the "Defect Detection and Prevention" (DDP) model and software tool. This model and the custom built tool that implements it initially arose from needs in the hardware domain. However, current spacecraft systems are a complex combination of hardware and software. In this paper, we describe some initial work investigating the applicability of this model and tool to software components.