Risk Management for Software Projects in an Agile Environment: Adopting Key Lessons from the Automotive Industry

The present paper seeks to improve the risk management practices undertaken in software development projects in agile environments. Software development projects, clearly having benefited from a steep incensement in both number and importance, is reportedly lagging behind in key project management areas, one of which being risk management. By providing key insights from one of the most successful and most rigorously structured industries – the automotive manufacturing – we aim to bring new value to the risk management practices in the form of a set of tools and techniques. The paper is strongly based on both a thorough relevant scientific literature investigation and the personal experience of the authors in both software and web development project management and quality and risk management systems in the automotive industry. In developing the theoretical part of the paper, we employed tools from and techniques from the fields of information structuring, quality management and engineering and competitive engineering. The scope of the paper is restricted to a theoretical framework, by proposing a context resulted from the over-positioning of APQP as a Stage-Gate model and the structure of the software development lifecycle adapted for to an agile environment. The application of the risk management process and the associated proposed tools and techniques are in strict adherence with the previously mentioned context.