A Knowledge Engineering Process for the Development of Argumentation Schemes for Risk Management in Software Projects

The engagement of project stakeholders in collaborative debates of risk management has an important contribution to software projects. To promote the identification, (re)use and critical analysis of stakeholders' arguments in these debates, this paper lays out a knowledge engineering process for the development of "argumentation schemes" for risk management. This process covers activities of identification, interpretation and causal-and-effect analysis of typical risk statements. From such risk management information and reusing generalized argumentation templates from argumentation catalogues discussed in the field of Artificial Intelligence, the process leads to the specification, generalization, validation and indexing of the developed schemes. As implemented in our project, a web-based system to support the execution of these development activities allows the recording of these schemes in a semi-structured representation format. An argumentation scheme for risks of non-stable requirements is presented so as to show the reusable argumentation artifacts that can be produced when our development process is followed.