How can we promote reuse of code, data and services? How can we make it easier to combine on-line resources to perform specific tasks? One serious impediment is the risk of relying on software that you do not control, especially the difficulty of determining whether the software is dependable enough for the specific task at hand. We concentrate on one form of economic risk mitigation, insurance, and explore its suitability for the software domain we are interested in. After reviewing the basic principles of insurance we present some feasible directions for dealing with software related issues and raise some software engineering research challenges.

Preferred citation: Orna Raz and Mary Shaw. Software risk management and insurance, Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Economics Driven Software Engineering Research, IEEE Computer Society, May 2001, pp. 56-61.