The Human Factor in Software Engineering

Monday evening at nine, in the long night of science at the REConf, I presented the results of my risk estimation experiment series. Despite the unfavorable "airtime", there was audience and they were highly interested. People evidently suffer from the gap that standards force them to estimate risks and their experience plus my experiments show them that humans have problems estimating risk. I still think that it makes sense to analyze risk because knowing the risks is the absolutely necessary basis for coping with them. And it is also good to know which are more relevant than others. Whether they cause an expected average damage of 5€ per month or 10€ is not so much important. It is rather important to know that it will not be 10,000€.