Top Ten Lists of Software Project Risks : Evidence from the Literature Survey

—Software project risk management is crucial for the software development projects. It is used for project planning and control purposes during the project execution. Risk management will help reduce project failure. To mange software project risks, the first step is to identify a list of risks for checklist. Researchers have tried to investigate common risk factors and proposed the top ten lists of software risks. However, a number of top ten lists were suggested in the literature. This article compiled a list of top ten software risk lists reviewed in the literature. The results from the analysis reveal that planning and control is the dimension of risks which mentioned most and misunderstanding of the requirement lack of management commitment and support are the most frequent mentioned software risks. However, project managers may benefit from applying these results but have to aware of the factors affecting these results