International Journal on Information Technology (IREIT), Vol. xx, n. x Manuscript received January 2013, revised February 2013 Copyright © 2013 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved Managing Software Project Risks (Implementation Phase) with Proposed Stepwise Regression Analysis Techniques Abdelrafe Elzamly 1 , Burairah Hussin 2 Abstract – Regardless how much effort we put for the success of software projects, many software projects have very high failure rate and risks are everywhere in life. Risk is not always avoidable, but it is controllable. The aim of this paper is to present new techniques by which we can study the impact of different risk management techniques and different risk factors on software development projects. The new technique uses the stepwise regression to managing the risks in a software project and reducing risk with software process improvement. Top ten software risk factors (Implementation phase) and thirty control factors were presented to respondents. The results show that all risks in software projects were important in software project manager perspective, whereas all controls are used most of time, and often. These tests were performed using regression analysis to compare the controls to each of the risk factors to determine if they are effective in mitigating the occurrence of each risk factor and selecting best model. We referred the risk management techniques were mitigated on ten top software risk factors in Table XLVI. The study has been conducted on a group of software project managers. Successful project risk management will greatly improve the probability of project success. Keywords: Software Project Management, Risk Management, Software Risk Factors, Implementation Phase, Risk management techniques, Stepwise Regression Analysis Techniques I. Introduction Despite much research and progress in the area of software project management, software development projects still fail to deliver acceptable systems on time and within budget. For some of these reasons corrective action is often difficult to cost-justify or to implement efficiently in practice [1]. Much of the failure could be avoided by managers pro-actively planning and dealing with risk factors rather than waiting for problems to occur and then trying to react. Project management and risk management has been proposed as a solution to preserve the quality and integrity of a project by reducing cost escalation [2]. Due to the involvement of risk management in monitoring the success of a software project, analyzing potential risks, and making decisions about what to do about potential risks, the risk management is considered the planned control of risk. Integrating formal risk management with project management is a new phenomenon in software engineering and product management community. It requires that project managers need to be involved in a project from the concept phase to the product's retirement [3]. In addition, risk is an uncertainty that can have a negative or positive effect on meeting project objectives. Risk management is the process of identifying, analyzing and controlling risk throughout the life of a project to meet the project objectives [2]. Clearly, the success or failure of software projects are generally assessed in three dimensions: budget, schedule, product functionality and quality [4]. However, the goal of risk management at early identification and recognition of risks and then actively changes the course of actions to mitigate and reduce the risk [5]. In the process of understanding the factors that contribute to software project success, risk is becoming increasingly important. This is a result of the size, complexity and strategic importance of many of the information systems currently being developed. Today, we must think of risk is a part of software project lifecycle and is important for a software project survival [6]. On the other hand, risk management aims to read risks as improvement opportunities and provide inputs to growth plans [6]. Also software projects are difficult to manage and too many of them end in failure[7].