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Agile risk management
Moran A., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2014. 101 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319050-07-2)
Date Reviewed: Oct 17 2014

In this book, the author introduces a methodology for agile risk management in software development. Risk management for information technology (IT) projects is not new and has always been an integral part of various software engineering and IT project management methodologies. However, for agile methodologies, risk management is often practiced implicitly by project team members without following a rigorous set of guidelines and principles. In effect, very few agile methodologies have risk management embedded into their core processes, although it can be argued that the dynamic systems development method (DSDM) that caters to large-scale projects might have considered risk management due to its alignment to PRINCE. As such, risk management in agile development is not perceived as mandatory in the sense that at the project level, the project management principle on which the project relies would have considered all risks during planning, for which development risks were included, and would be managed by the project management team and not the development team during the development of the software.

To date, to the best of my knowledge, there is no software engineering material fully dedicated to discussions on risk management as part of the agile process. This book then comes in handy as it closes such a gap in the literature. Existing agile methodologies, such as XP, Scrum, and DSDM, can then be tailored so as to take into account risk management as an integral part of the overall agile process.

Chapters 1 and 2 are dedicated to an overview of agile software development as well as that of project risk management. This helps the reader to capture the importance of risk management as well as to ascertain the explicit absence of risk management in current agile software development processes. The foregoing chapters form the basis for the main contribution of this book (chapter 3) on agile risk management that proposes a complete end-to-end methodology for undertaking risk management in an agile setting. Various agile artifacts are tailored and used for managing risk, such as the kanban board (risk walling), the burn down chart (risk monitoring), and the time box (risk identification and risk treatment).

With this approach, risk management is fully integrated in the agile development process instead of being managed mainly at the project level (and overlooking in the process some critical risk elements that can only be managed by development teams). This approach would, in fact, significantly contribute to the improvement of the quality of the developed software in that most of the identified risks in the development process can easily be identified and mitigated.

Chapter 4 further provides an illustration on how the foregoing methodology can be applied to a range of agile methodologies, such as DSDM, XP, and Scrum. This helps practitioners of any of the methodologies to have a clear idea on where to consider various risk management activities within the overall agile software development process. The author concludes the book with a dedicated chapter on the status quo of agile at the enterprise level, demonstrating that risk management is seldom considered, prompting the need to have it as an integral part of the development process so as to produce quality software.

The book is definitely relevant, instructive, practical, worth reading, and recommended to agile software development practitioners.

Reviewer:  Ernest Ketcha Ngassam Review #: CR142844 (1501-0044)
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Project And People Management (K.6.1 )
 
 
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