Uncertainty management in software engineering: Past, present, and future

Software development has significantly matured in the last decade. However, one of the critical challenges today is uncertainty inherent to every aspect of software development including requirement specifications, design, coding, and testing. In this paper, we propose a framework for uncertainty management in software engineering. The framework is used to model uncertainty inherent to software development activities and manage their consequences. The framework consists of four main phases: identification and prioritization, modeling and analysis, management and planning, and monitoring and evaluation. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)-based development is selected as an example to illustrate how the proposed framework is used in a simple but intuitive case study to represent uncertainty and manage its consequences.