Risk assessment on distributed software projects

Risk Assessment is a growing discipline on the context of distributed software projects. The complexity to develop software and the related knowledge require automated support for project managers in order to analyze actions to reduce the project´s risks and measure the impact of such actions. My thesis aims to investigate an approach for the assessment of risks in globally distributed software projects. This research proposes to apply stochastic simulation technique to analyze project data and identify factors that are likely to impact team productivity and that could affect the team´s ability to meet its schedule objective. We aim this thesis to be applied by project management groups to perform risk assessment early in the software development process and to help decision-making process.