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/