Current early risk assessment techniques rely on subjective human judgments and 
unrealistic assumptions such as fixed requirements and work breakdown structures.
This is a weak approach because different people could arrive at different 
conclusions from the same scenario even for projects with a stable and well-defined
scope, and such projects are rare.
This paper introduces a formal model to assess the risk and the duration of
software projects automatically, based on objective indicators that can be 
measured early in the process. The model has been designed to account for 
significant characteristics of evolutionary software processes, such as 
requirement complexity, requirement volatility and organizational efficiency. 
The formal model based on these three indicators estimates the duration and risk 
of evolutionary software processes. The approach supports (a) automation of risk 
assessment and, (b) early estimation methods for evolutionary software processes.