Towards Risk Based Effort Estimation: A Framework to Identify, Analyze, and Classify Risk for Early Identification at Requirement Engineering Phase

Studies have shown that requirement defects are among the major sources of failure constituting 32.65%. It is one of the overlooked aspects in requirements engineering and is generally considered as a potential problem that can affect the projects in a negative way. The main objective of this article is to propose a risk-based effort estimation technique that identifies, analyzes, and classifies risk at requirement engineering phase to restrain them from propagating to the later stages of the project lifecycle. This article extends the scope by integrating both threats and opportunities and their further classification based on extensive requirement analysis. The validation of the proposed approach was conducted on successfully delivered real project data. A survey is also conducted as a part of qualitative analysis for analyzing the applicability of the proposed approach. The results of the proposed method are promising and strongly support findings of literature stating that the effort needed to fix issues at a later stage in project lifecycle are costly as compared to early stages.