Software requirement risk assessment using UML

Summary form only given. Risk assessment is an integral part of software risk management. There are several methods for risk assessment during various phases of software development and at different levels of abstraction. However, there are very few techniques available for assessing risk at the requirements level and those that are available are highly subjective and are not based on any formal design models. Such techniques are human-intensive and highly error prone. This paper presents a methodology that assesses software risk at the requirements level using Unified Modeling Language (UML) specifications of the software at the early development stages. Each requirement is mapped to a specific operational scenario in UML. We determine the possible failure modes of the scenario and find out the complexity of the scenario in each failure mode. The risk factor of a scenario in a failure mode is obtained by combining the complexity of the failure mode in that scenario and the severity of the failure. The result of applying the methodology on a cardiac pacemaker case study is presented.