The Rational Unified Process : A study on risk awareness

Abstract: Introduction to problem: Many software development projects today have a tendency to fail on some level. Even though they may not fail entirely, they might be completed with schedule delays, budget overrun or with poor quality that do not meet the customer?s requirements. When a project fails in some way, it is because one or many project risks have occurred. Our own opinion in this matter is that if the project team members are more aware of the project?s risks, it might increase the probability of project success. Therefore, we wanted to explore the area of risk awareness. We contacted Volvo Information Technology AB and through discussions we decided to investigate risk awareness when using one of their software project methods. That method was the Rational Unified Process. This report has not been conducted because Volvo IT considers this to be a problem that they wanted to investigate. Instead, we wanted to investigate this since we find the area of risk awareness among project team members interesting and we were able to do this with help from Volvo IT. Even though we mention the term ?project success? in this report, we will not investigate this in the report. Hypothesis: ?By using the Rational Unified Process, a higher awareness of the risks can be achieved by all team members of the project? Aim: The aim of this report is to investigate if risk awareness among project team members increases when software development projects make use of the Rational Unified Process. Method: We have used a web-based questionnaire to gather information. Four projects at Volvo Information Technology AB were contacted and asked to participate in the questionnaire. Two of these were using RUP and two did not use RUP. Personal e-mails were later sent out to each of the project managers with a description of the aim of our research and the way it would be carried out. The participants had a total of seven workdays to fill out the questionnaire. After seven days the site of the questionnaire were closed down. Conclusion: The differences in answers to certain questions have been rather significant between the two project methods. On the whole though, the answers have been positive for both project methods from a risk awareness point of view. Therefore, it seems to us that risk awareness is not dependent on the project method that is being used. We feel that we have not received enough convincing proof that members of RUP projects possess a higher awareness of project risks than non-RUP project members. Therefore we are of the opinion that we cannot verify our hypothesis.