IT Lesson

Agile as a risk mitigation technique

When I first started using and investigating agile principles and practices, I didnt 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 (Im sure Ive missed a few):

Project Risk	Agile Practice
Addressing schedule and estimate risks	Manage to done, Velocity, Relative estimating, User stories
Addressing the risk of building the wrong thing	Deliver early and often in small increments, Iteration demos
Addressing the risk of validating your architecture	Steel thread, Iterative development
Identifying risks and issues as soon as possible	Daily stand-ups, Frequent retrospectives, Iterative Development, Manage to done
Addressing scope risks	Iterative development, User stories, User story slicing, Relative Estimating, User story mapping, Trim the tail
Addressing people risks	Paired programming, Team ownership practices
Addressing quality risks	TDD, BDD, ATDD

This list doesnt 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/