MaSO: A tool for aiding the management of schedule overrun

Curbing schedule slippage is a daunting task in software industry. This problem evolves mainly because of poor analysis of risk factors and their management. This paper aims to handle this predicament with the help of Influence Diagram (ID). The three main risk factors that adversely affect the schedule are creeping user requirements, requirement instability and use of unnecessary features in the project. An integration of impacts of these with experts´ opinion and with the existing databases (consisting of probability of occurrence of risk factors) helped us to create an ID based system that is capable to model the schedule slippage. This system can be used by the software manager at any stage of software development.