The product development process is a very complex thing that needs a lot of attention to detail and experience in how to make it right. There are multiple engagement models like Fixed Price and Time and Materials, there are few options for hiring like in-house or outsourcing, and there are various methodologies like Agile and Waterfall for running your project. 

Whatever road you choose, there is one thing in common for projects like simple mobile applications or sophisticated Big Data solutions for an enterprise. This thing is the risk, and you need to learn how to deal with it. Why? 

According to Finances Online, proven project management practices reduce the risk of budget waste up to 30 times, compared to companies that ignore those practices. 

As you see from the graphic, based on the data from PMI, there are ten causes that might lead to the failure of your product. You can’t influence some of them, like the changes in the priorities of your organization, but you can fix aspects like opportunities and risks to ensure the success of the project. 

Risk management software engineering is an important topic that deserves an article of its own. According to a survey by Safran, 92% of CEOs that completed a survey, believe that information about the risks is critical for the long-term success of the software project. 

But how do you obtain the information about possible threats to the project in time? This is exactly what we will talk about in the following sections, as we will be sharing our expertise and experience in risk management in software project management.

“Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.”

— Denis Waitley

What is risk management in software engineering?

The primary purpose of risk management is to identify, assess, prevent and control possible risks that might affect negatively the product development process. For an effective risk management process, you should set a competent person that will be responsible for possible threats to the project. 

It is important to have a plan that will address possible threats and act before they will be able to cause any damage. While you have to have one expert focused on dealing with risks, it shouldn’t be your sole responsibility. The risk management process in software engineering should involve multiple parties to reach the maximum efficiency:

• Project Manager should facilitate the risk and arrange a meeting
• The team on a project should decide who will take the roles of recorder and timekeeper
• Stakeholders must participate in risk mitigation and avoidance strategies
• You could also include part-time subject-matter experts that will participate in the project while solving the risks
• The sponsor of a project may be involved depending on a situation, size and the scope of the project

Process of risk management in software engineering

Every business scenario is unique, and there is no unified solution that will fit all the cases, industries, and businesses. Risk management can be taken in different ways, however, there is a basic formula that can become a great start. Here are the essential steps: 

Determine the threats

Figure out what possible risks exist, that already materialized and could have a negative impact on your company. Some examples of risks may include natural disasters, and power or utility outages. You should include all possible factors during the risk assessment process. 

Find out who or what might be affected

Discover what assets of your company might be in danger when the potential threat will become a reality. The list of things you might protect can include employee safety, the reputation of your business, critical infrastructure, IT infrastructure, and overall business operations.  

Plan and set preventive measures

After you identified the threats and their possible targets, you should figure out what steps need to be taken in order to prevent risk or minimize the consequences. 

Record your results

When you successfully dealt with a threat, it will be a good idea to store your findings for your company to have an actionable strategy in case the risk occurs again sometime in the future. 

Conduct regular reviews

From time to time, and make a review of a current risk situation in your company, as your business is constantly evolving and expanding, there could be more possible threats that might pop up. 

Now, that we talked about how to practice risk management in software engineering, let’s discuss more closely what specific threats you might face during the development of your product. 

What are the potential threats to every software project?

Innovative technologies

When you introduce new, nascent technology into your processes, you take your chances to surpass the competitors, but put your business in danger automatically. The truth is, that most software projects work with innovative technologies to some degree anyway. We don’t talk about some groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques (but don’t exclude them, either). Things like protocols, standards, and tools are changing all the time, so your tech team must keep up with the advancements. The best advice to deal with this risk is to train your employees, so they would be able to deliver the best results. 

Changes in functional and user requirements

Software requirements illustrate all needs of the users in the form of features and functions of the product. Defining requirements for a particular project can take a lot of time and effort, and become a complex thing. The bad news here is that the requirements might change on the fly after the discovery, prototyping, and integration phases. These changes in requirements could potentially lead to disruptions in the development process, so they should be carefully planned in the first place. 

Changes in the architecture of the system

There is always a threat of making bad decisions in choosing a platform, a particular component, or an entire architecture for your project. To deal with technological risks, you should form a team of proficient experts right from the very start that will make the correct design choices. If you go with outsourcing, it is vital not to compromise on the abilities of your employees, because fixing their mistakes can cost you a lot more in the long run.  

Performance issues

Conduct benchmarks and threshold testing of the product to ensure that the development process is going according to the expectations of you and your partners. If the product fails any key tests, you will be able to identify the lack of performance and fix things.

Management problems

There are a lot of things that can go wrong from a managerial standpoint. Make sure to set effective communication among all participants of the development process to get the best results out of your team and prevent any possible issues of this type. 

Types of risks in risk management with practical examples

Example of an internal risk

Imagine one of the team members being unable to work on the project, and it might seriously affect the end result. To prevent this issue, all of your developers must be aware of what each team member is doing to substitute for another, when necessary. 

Example of an external risk

There could be a moment when an external provider will change a particular policy in your country. The good news is, that software developers are usually aware of possible problems that might occur with the provider, and are ready for the worst-case scenario. The best you can do here is to talk with your developers and be aware of what this scenario is. 

Example of an external and internal risk

Commitment is one of the most important aspects of the software development process, and it is closely connected to communication. The lack of commitment in one department will result in a lack of performance in the other. For example, when developers won’t finish the necessary part of code in time, the UX/UI designers will have nothing to do, and the stakeholders won’t get a demo when they expect it. 

To prevent this from happening, it is important to have a product owner role as well. This expert should be in charge of effective and close cooperation between all departments that are responsible for creating a software product. Having a product owner won’t solve all possible issues that your development team might have, but this person will alert you when anything will go wrong, and you will have time to act. 

Principles for all types of risk management in software engineering

FAQ

What is risk management in software project management?

This is a process that focuses on dealing with potential problems that might occur during the development of your project. Those problems can be divided into the usage of new technologies, changed functional and user requirements, changes in the architecture, lack of performance, and different organizational issues. There is no single formula to deal with all possible threats, however, there are certain approaches that will help you to start setting up a risk management process.  

What are the 5 stages of risk management?

Five main stages include: determining the threats, figuring out the possible consequences, planning preventive measures, recording results, and conducting regular reviews. 

Why is risk management important in software projects?

It is important because it can save tons of money for your organization and can be a deciding factor in making sure that the entire project will be successful and will be delivered on time and within budget, according to specs. The absence of the process will put your entire product in danger, and it can become a victim of unforeseen circumstances. 

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The process of choosing a partner is implemented as in Tinder: you “swipe” the lines of code to the left and the rest to the right. In the case of a match, the program will provide an opportunity to correspond in chat. The service can be used with the Visual Studio Code Editor, which is available on iOS and Android.

The main evaluation material will be an excerpt of code that users will review – a maximum of 600 characters.

In order to register, the user will need an Apple ID or GitHub, from where the service will take the programmer’s photo, name and description. It is also necessary to specify the programming language, age, purpose of registration and allow access to the location, so you can find partners nearby.

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The company needs an experienced programmer with detailed knowledge of the RISC-V command system and the Vector Arm command system. He will join the Vector and Numerics Group (VaNG) team, which is part of the Core Operating Systems group. The Vector and Numerics Group team is responsible for developing and improving all kinds of embedded subsystems running on iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

Known for its secrecy, Apple does not say directly what solutions it intends to implement using RISC-V, but the job description states that the programmer should work with machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing systems. Some background in low-level, high-performance programming is required, and indeed the job description itself mentions that Apple is already working with RISC-V. It’s stated explicitly that they would be working in a team which is already “using innovative RISC-V solutions.

Today, Apple has dozens of all kinds of products. For example, high-performance products like the Mac, including the MacBook, iPhone smartphones, iPad tablets and Apple TV set-top boxes use chipsets based on custom Arm Cores. In addition, devices like the Apple Watch, AirPods and Homepod Mini use Arm SiP technology, and Arm cores are also used in controllers like the T2, W3 and U1.

In addition to chipsets for high-performance devices, each Apple device uses multiple Arm cores (although individual devices still use chips based on x86 architecture). Apple pays licensing fees for the use of each core, and as the number of cores in devices like SSD controllers and smartwatches continues to increase, we have to pay more and more. In this regard, the use of open and accordingly free RISC-V architecture looks extremely attractive, it could save the company millions of dollars in royalties.

At the same time, integration of custom cores based on RISC-V architecture into Apple’s ecosystem requires software preparation and verification of hardware and software compatibility. This is where programmers familiar with both RISC-V and Arm are needed.

Considering that Apple is already working on RISC-V based solutions, it is still a matter of time before some core types are replaced by an alternative architecture. It is known that RISC-V is mostly used today for auxiliary solutions with low performance, but with the evolution of technologies we cannot rule out more interesting solutions.

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According to the developers, Codex can now significantly simplify the work of experienced programmers, as well as help to train beginners. Artificial Intelligence literally turns a stream of words into real software like websites or rudimentary games. For example, a user can describe the basic appearance of a site or its functionality by listing requirements like the location of menus or text boxes using plain spoken English, and Codex will generate a finished product based on its own “insights” into what needs to be accomplished.

In this variant, programming skills are not required at all in some cases. However, basically Codex will only work as an “assistant” or “deputy” programmer, implementing the conceptual ideas of the “creators” in the simplest way possible.

According to Greg Brockman, the technical director and co-founder of OpenAI, the new tool is intended for a wide range of programmers. First of all, it will allow them to get rid of monotonous repetitive work using libraries, functions and APIs.

Codex is based on the GPT-3 algorithm – created by OpenAI for generating “meaningful” texts based on analyzing many terabytes of text material on the Internet. However, it can provoke a negative reaction from developers who put free and open source software online. The algorithm uses additional data that was literally “shoveled” from free software repositories for subsequent analysis.

OpenAI has said it does not violate any copyright or related rights laws. Nevertheless, many people expect criticism from volunteers who created countless lines of code – the company intends to cash in on the efforts of the community, who posted their software to be parsed and used for free. So far, the programmers do not have a common or at least dominant position on the newly created tool.

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At the same time Microsoft released Visual Studio 2022 Preview 5 for the users who wish to receive new functions that are not available in the stable versions of the application earlier than others. According to the available data, after November 8 this version of the product will become Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 1 and it will be possible to use it within the framework of the user’s existing license.

As for the innovations, we should mention the appearance of 64-bit version of the IDE, as well as NET 6 and C++20 support. Developers have optimized the work of some functions and improved performance of diagnostic and debugging tools. Live Share text chat has been integrated and there are some improvements to the IntelliCode model. The macOS version of the product has an updated user interface.

Microsoft will hold a virtual event dedicated to the launch of Visual Studio 2022. It will be broadcasted on November 8 at 8:30 local time (18:30 Moscow time). Representatives of the software giant’s management are expected to speak within the framework of the product presentation.

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Miguel Ojeda, who wrote the particle gas pedal software for the Large Hadron Collider and worked on security for programming languages, will reportedly be writing parts of the Linux kernel in Rust. Google will pay for the contract through the nonprofit organization Internet Security Research Group.

Adding modules written in Rust to the Linux kernel is expected to reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities caused by insecure memory handling. At the time of its release in 1991, Linux was written in C, a language which is more vulnerable than modern programming languages. Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds has said he is ready for a change if the value of using Rust for Linux is proven. So far, Ojeda has proposed 13 changes, which are necessary to run Rust modules on Linux.

Google thanked the Linux community programmers who are working on this project. “The community has already done and continues to do a great job of adding Rust support to the Linux kernel,” Google said in a statement.

As for the Rust language, it was developed by Mozilla, but is currently being developed by the nonprofit Rust Foundation. It pays special attention to secure memory handling. Microsoft’s security division stated back in 2019 that “Rust represents the best alternative to C and C++.”

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The new product is called GitHub Copilot. The tool uses source code uploaded to the GitHub code-sharing service, which Microsoft acquired in 2018. Open AI, an artificial intelligence research startup, participated in the implementation. Microsoft invested $1 billion in it in the summer of 2019.

Researchers at Microsoft and several other companies have been trying for decades to teach computers to write their own code. GitHub Copilot is a big step in that direction. The product relies on a large amount of code in many programming languages and Azure’s enormous computing power. Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, says GitHub Copilot can almost completely replace a programmer’s partner. The tool looks at existing code and comments on it, as well as the location of the cursor, and suggests adding one or more lines depending on the context. As the programmer accepts or rejects the suggestions, the model learns and becomes much more sophisticated and intelligent over time.

Friedman says the GitHub Copilot significantly speeds up programming. Hundreds of developers on GitHub, he says, have already appreciated the product’s capabilities and don’t shut it down all day long.

Experts point out that the main advantage of GitHub Copilot is that it saves the programmer from having to study piles of documentation, thereby saving precious hours. Copilot is reported to work best with JavaScript, Python and TypeScript at the moment. The tool will initially appear in Microsoft Visual Studio Code, a free open-source product, before the company plans to include it in a commercial version of Visual Studio.

Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman says the Codex model behind GitHub’s Copilot is a descendant of the powerful GPT-3 model, which the company’s experts have trained on many terabytes of publicly available code. Copilot, according to GitHub staff, has a number of security mechanisms built in, giving confidence that the product will generate high-quality code. Microsoft reportedly plans to release a version of the product in the future that companies can train to understand their own programming styles. For now, Microsoft offers a service that is only trained on code stored in publicly available repositories.

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The rules will begin to apply to all developers who agree to participate in the program. Detailed registration instructions and forms can be found on the Google website. Under the terms, developers will be required to deduct a 15% commission (instead of 30%) until their products have earned one million dollars within a year. If that happens, the company will raise the fee to the standard 30%. The offer applies to companies, not individual apps. If there are multiple linked accounts, the amount will be calculated from the income of all accounts. Once that barrier is reached, the fee will change for everyone.

The rules will take effect July 1, 2021. Due to the fact that they start in the middle of the year, the total barrier will be reduced to $500 thousand.

In addition, the IT-giant has launched a support program called Play Media Experience, which will reduce the commission to 15% for developers of media products and services. Only those who meet a number of criteria will be allowed to participate in the program:

• Provide access to media files that are not created by users;
• Have more than 100 thousand downloads in Play Market;
• A quality interface and a high rating in the store;
• High rating of the developer account;
• Integration of Google platforms: Android TV, Google TV, and others.

There are certain content requirements for participants:

• Books. Premium books, audiobooks and comics. Support for WearOS and Android Auto. Optimization for tablets and folding devices;
• Video. Movies, shows, live sports broadcasts. Support for Android TV, Google TV, and Google Cast with multi-platform playback is required;
• Audio. Premium music and subscription option. Support for Android Auto, Google Cast, Wear OS and Android TV, with playback across platforms.

Google did not give a launch date for the latter. The company also promised to reveal the changes for game developers at a special conference from July 12 to 13

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According to Qichacha analysts, China now has 439,000 registered AI-related companies. In 2020, the number of new organizations in the field of AI was 172 thousand, and in the first half of 2021 such organizations were registered another 153 thousand. Thus, the growth of registrations for the year was 150.8%, and the year is not over yet!

The transition from 2019 to 2020 showed an increase in the number of new AI companies in China at 292.8%, and 2021 promises to be even more “fruitful” for the field of AI in China.

The issue of finance is extremely interesting. Most Chinese AI companies declare quite large share capital. Apparently, local investors are willing and invest a lot of money in AI development. For example, companies with registered capital of less than 1 million yuan ($155,000) account for only 24% of the registered companies, while those with registered capital between 1 and 5 million yuan account for 39%, and those with capital over 5 million yuan (from $755,000 and more) account for 37%.

It is also interesting to note that the most AI companies in China are registered in three neighboring provinces on the southeast coast of the country: Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. There are 64,000, 50,000 and 40,000 AI companies in each, respectively. Programmers have always been drawn to the south and to the sea, which in the case of Chinese regional development programs is further supported by subsidies for provincial economic development.

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Among the exotic programming languages for writing malware are Go (Golang), D (DLang), Nim and Rust. As a rule, these languages are used to create malicious software aimed at large organizations and which exploits weaknesses in the protection of the corporate infrastructure. We are talking about malware that implements multi-stage, carefully planned and organized cyber-attacks.

Once on the victim’s computer, these software modules bypass traditional defenses to later download, decode and launch remote access Trojans, most often Remcos and NanoCore, as well as Cobalt Strike beacons.

In some cases, when the cybercriminals have sufficient resources, non-standard languages for these purposes are used not only for the modules performing the initial attack, but also for the whole malware package. The Go language is of particular interest to attackers. It is used by hackers on an almost regular basis for all major platforms.

According to the authors of the study, new or unusual programming languages make it difficult to decompile malware, circumvent defenses that use signature-based detection tools with relative ease, and simplify cross-platform compatibility of attacks. The code base of such malware itself is an additional level of disguise. Their developers, in fact, do not have to make any extra effort; the effectiveness of the attack is increased simply by the fact that one of these programming languages is used.

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