Managing risks of the unknown, in an agile development environment.

Hi everyone, in this blogpost I want to reflect on my experience as a developer in handling risk on agile development.

Types of risk:

Let's start by identifying the typical types of risks that appear during an agile development.

• Going over the budget.
• Personnel Risk. People falling sick or leaving the project.
• Knowledge Risk. Problems with knowledge transfer, lack of people with experience in a specific topic, etc.
• Productivity Risk. Specially if the goals are long term.
• Time Risk. To adapt to the project requirements and avoid delays.

My propose solutions

Based on my experience as a developer, these are my personal solutions to the identified problems:
Budget: The provision of the budget should be included with each sprint. In this way, the costs will come on demand, and their impact on the project will be more impactful and measurable.

Personnel, Knowledge Risks: A good way of tackling both problems will be to create small subteams, in which senior people is mixed with more junior. This will increase the knowledge sharing (which should be part of the subteam goal). Also, if some absence occur, it will be easy to replace.

Time, Productivity Risk: Both can be deal with small and achievable sprints. This will make the team to have small goals to focus. Additionally to this, some proof of concept demos should be organised regularly, which will give a bigger goal that will showcase the progress on a real scale.

Conclusion

Because on an agile environment there are no formal documents, risk management needs to be incorporate as part of the process. I hope you find my ideas useful. I hope to hear you feedback on them !