Preliminary assessment of risks and uncertainties of a software development project

After the developed system is recognized as being in demand, the contractor must conduct an analysis of the feasibility of the project. But for this, it is necessary to supplement the concept of the project with a risk assessment, a technical solution, choose a development methodology, develop a preliminary work plan and estimate costs. Only after that it will be possible to understand whether we can implement the project, or whether compromises with the customer will be necessary.

Risk assessment is important because at the initial stage, many questions related to the system do not yet have clear answers. Having compiled a list of the most important risks and outstanding issues, the contractor can try to reduce the uncertainty, for example, by offering the contractor several different technical solutions. Thus, it will be possible to reduce uncertainty, reduce estimates of the required budget and deadlines, and, accordingly, increase the chance of winning the competition.

Particular attention should be paid to the requirements of system flexibility. Execution of dynamically generated code, dynamic scaling of the system, duplication of some components in order to ensure the reliability of the system - these and other similar issues have a very high cost. In my work I encounter them in every project. But you can almost always find an acceptable compromise.