Project managers and developers often must evaluate scope and impact of proposed changes as part of “What-If?” scenario planning, in terms of the probability and cost of cascading changes: the technical risk.

In this project, we attempted to provide a technique and tool to allow early estimation of technical risk—the product of the probability that a change will be need and the cost of that change—that can be used for vertical communication within an organization.

The TRE tool represents a system as a graph where the nodes are classes and the arcs are dependencies. A user can select one or more points as the source of changes. TRE determines how those changes are likely to propagate, and colours the graph (in shades of red) to show the points that are most likely to be affected.

Publications

• Robert J. Walker, Reid Holmes, Ian Hedgeland, Puneet Kapur, and Andrew Smith. A lightweight approach to technical risk estimation via probabilistic impact analysis. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '06), 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 98–104, 2006. doi: 10.1145/1137983.1138008

• Robert J. Walker, Reid Holmes, Ian Hedgeland, Puneet Kapur, and Andrew Smith. A Lightweight Approach to Technical Risk Estimation via Probabilistic Impact Analysis. Technical report 2006-817-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada, February 2006. 8 pages. doi: 1880/46089