Risk management (RM) plays a key role in project management, as it allows the identification and management of threats that may arise during the execution of projects. In addition, project management within the software industry is evolving rapidly today, bringing new challenges as the emergence and use of new approaches has brought a greater degree of complexity to the RM process.

The aim of this paper is to carry out a systematic review of the literature (SLR) in the field of software risk, in an attempt to characterize and present the state of the art in this field, identifying gaps and opportunities for further research.

From the analysis of the results of this SLR, it could be seen that the interest of the scientific community has shifted away from the definition of research work that addressed an integrated risk management process, towards work that focused on specific activities in this process.

It was also observed that there is a clear lack of scientific rigor in the validation process in the different studies, and a deficiency in the use of standards or de facto models to define them.