Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Agile as a risk mitigation technique

When I first started using and investigating agile principles and practices, I didn't immediately realize how well these techniques worked in order to reduce project risk. As I talk with others about adopting agile, many fear the 'risk' of moving to agile techniques. Here are a few thoughts on how agile practices reduce risk on your projects (I'm sure I've missed a few):

Project RiskAgile Practice
Addressing schedule and estimate risksManage to done, Velocity, Relative estimating, User stories
Addressing the risk of building the wrong thingDeliver early and often in small increments, Iteration demos
Addressing the risk of validating your architectureSteel thread, Iterative development
Identifying risks and issues as soon as possibleDaily stand-ups, Frequent retrospectives, Iterative Development, Manage to done
Addressing scope risksIterative development, User stories, User story slicing, Relative Estimating, User story mapping, Trim the tail
Addressing people risksPaired programming, Team ownership practices
Addressing quality risksTDD, BDD, ATDD

This list doesn't address the risks that accompany any change initiative, but it does underline that many agile techniques are directly targetted at averting project risk. Agile practices help us shorten the distance between guessing (planning, designing, estimating, etc) and knowing.

See also - Chris Matts wrote about this topic recently and gave some nice examples of how he talked about risk during a methodology audit.

http://theitriskmanager.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/the-language-of-risk/
Posted by Unknown at 3:10 PM
Labels:

5 comments:

  1. Alex ArmstrongApril 5, 2011 at 3:52 PM

    Great topic, Steve. One that you could probably add is "project cancellation risk" with the Agile practice of "delivering done usable software at the end of every Sprint" so as not to be stuck with the best damn architecture known to man that does absolutely nothing.

    Alex

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 5, 2011 at 3:53 PM

    I agree whole heartedly - thanks Alex

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownDecember 16, 2011 at 9:21 AM

    Chris Matts wrote about this topic recently and gave some nice examples of how he talked about risk during a methodology audit.

    I've added a link to the post above.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousDecember 16, 2011 at 11:30 AM

    Steve

    Nice post.

    The key is to understand how the practices address risks. Some of them are more subtle than others. Otherwise you can break the risk management process.

    Chris

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownDecember 16, 2011 at 11:36 AM

    Yes, I agree. I liked your post because it gave a few examples. Sounds like a great blog post series for someone to write ;)

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)