Importance of Risk Management in Agile Projects

Vishva Rodrigo
3 min readJul 31, 2019

--

To raise the possibilities to attain the good outcome of a project, it’s significant for the development team to have a comprehend about potential risk, to methodically evaluate those risks, anticipating feasible effects and causes and identify appropriate ways to dealing with those risks. To ensure that potential risk managed properly, decision making process needs to be consisted of risk management process. Agile development process does not consist of specific risk management techniques due to it is considered that brief iterative development cycles reduce uncertain collision relevant to the development. Moreover, development teams believe, essentially agile perform risk management by nature. However, Some specific situations the built-in risk driven nature is inadequate. Risk management in agile is dealt with risk identification, assessment, prioritization, treatment and monitoring in a settled manner with principles and practices. It’s not only considers about threats, but also circumstances. An agile risk management process associated with implementing an understanding of the description of risk facing an agile project. It’s also establishing with readjust the current process to the appropriate way for managing risks and lead agile project to the success. Furthermore, Agile based software development project methods focused on the hand over the maximum prosperity to the product owner. As a result of that, it’s getting high probability of rising risks when the team highly focused on achieving their goals for the sprint and provides limited time for expanding security of the product.

The risk consists of three imperative segments such as uncertainty, loss and finite duration. Ordinarily, an agile project always has uncertainty as to whether a risk will arise. The risks may not occur, if the project has powerful risk management. It can prevent them from occurring. Risk management contributes to success of agile projects by ensuring the project within schedule, budget and achieve the objectives. Not only that, but also enables prosperous anticipation and react immediately changing environment and supports for decisions through a customer satisfaction. The risk management process also improved customer satisfaction by ensuring the needs of customers. On other hand, risk management process supports for evaluating and verifying project viability and studying and handling the risks in order to decrease the loss. Proper risk management plan avoids the risks and avoid unsatisfactory projects and in order to improve profit margins. Furthermore, before a project begins, it supports to improve quality of the product and also improves cost estimation by recognizing and reducing potential risks. This process also ensures that management obtains prepared risk in detail early enough to implement proper reactions that will grant pragmatic cost estimates and schedule and ensure successful accomplishment of the agile project. Principles of risk management, escalating team participation by presenting a method for the listing problems that can be arise and rising the team’s cooperation in the overall agile based project success. Apart from that, implementing risk is a durable activity to assure that the risk analysis process is at the middle point of the process of decision making and failure to acknowledge risk issues may provide serious consequences.

Few tips that can be used in agile software development projects with regard to risk management in order to acquire the success of the project,

  • It is recommended to conduct the brief team risk evaluation meetings instead of planning sessions and place in the each iteration. It helps to manage risk properly in the iteration and it helps to conduct a critical discussion about identified and non-identified risks within the team.
  • It is recommended to more focus on the risk identification process in the each evaluation meeting and daily meetings.
  • It is recommended to make a proper risk evaluation list and keep the risk list feasible and visible to everyone. It helps to identify risks that have not seen before and existent risks.

--

--