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Risk Register and Theme Aggregation

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About This MicroSim

This MicroSim presents a populated ATAM risk register for a healthcare patient portal, organized into risk themes. Each theme expands into its constituent risks, badged by Severity and Probability (red H, orange M, yellow L). Clicking a risk shows its full documentation — evidence, mechanism, and a recommended mitigation. You can sort risks by combined priority, filter by severity, and toggle mitigations, so you can assess which architectural improvements would reduce the most severe risk most efficiently.

How to Use

  1. Click a theme (gold header) to expand or collapse its risks; the impact badge shows the theme's business impact.
  2. Click a risk to read its evidence, mechanism, severity, probability, and priority score in the detail panel.
  3. Sort by Severity × Probability to surface the highest-priority risks within each theme.
  4. Show Mitigation reveals the recommended fix for the selected risk; Severity filter narrows to H, M, or L.
  5. Expand Non-Risks to see the well-addressed scenarios, and read the summary bar for the totals.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/atam/sims/risk-register-explorer/main.html"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

Undergraduate / Professional

Duration

15-20 minutes

Prerequisites

Familiarity with risk severity/probability rating and ATAM risk themes.

Bloom's Taxonomy Level

Evaluate (L5)

Learning Objective

Students will be able to interpret a populated risk register, identify the highest-priority risk themes, and recommend which architectural improvements would address the most severe risks most efficiently.

Activities

  1. Prioritize (6 min): Students sort by severity × probability and name the top three risks across all themes.
  2. One fix, many risks (7 min): Students identify the theme whose mitigation would close the most high-priority risks at once.
  3. Justify (5 min): Students recommend the first improvement the team should fund and justify it from the register.

Assessment

Give students a fixed improvement budget (one theme) and ask them to choose which theme to fund and defend the choice using severity × probability.

References

  1. Bass, L., Clements, P., & Kazman, R. (2021). Software Architecture in Practice (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley.
  2. Kazman, R., Klein, M., & Clements, P. (2000). ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation (CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004).