The Risk Focus Team at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has identified a means of characterizing risk-based diagnostic methods and techniques. The Risk Focus Team has constructed a tentative "roadmap" for consultants, program managers, and other personnel involved in the systems and software acquisition community. The roadmap will help them to identify the appropriate risk diagnostic techniques for assessing threats to program success.

This technical note describes the characteristics that determine whether a risk diagnostic method qualifies for the roadmap. The technical note identifies three methods, the SEI Software Risk Evaluation, Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method, and the SEI Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Usage Risk Evaluation that fit the characteristics described. The technical note also describes the characteristics of diagnostic methods that do not qualify for the roadmap.

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