Software quality depends heavily on the quality of the process used to develop it. In order to assist the definition of an adequate process, there are several process models, maturity models and quality standards. However, creating or improving a software development process may be tough due to the large amount of available information and decisions that have to be made. Another central problem is the risk of defining an ineffective process, that is, one that increases the bureaucracy but doesn`t improve the quality of the systems developed with its support. This dissertation presents an approach for defining software development processes based on the concepts of system analysis, based on the analogy between software and process elaboration. One of the most important attributes of this approach is the focus on Risk Management, considering the identified risks in the process definition as well the possible risks during software process execution.