Risk Management

Risk management means anticipating risks and preparing plans to reduce their effect. In other words, Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability.

Risk
some adverse circumstances that may happen and affect negatively the project, the product, and/or the business.
Categories of risk:

• Project risks
• Product risks
• Business risks

Project risks
Project risk management is an important aspect of project management. As projects start, project managers should work with the project sponsor and key stakeholders to clarify the project objectives or goals. Once the objectives are clear, share how risk management can help to achieve the objectives.

Product risks
Product risk is the potential for losses related to the marketing of a product or service. It is managed using a standard risk management process of identifying, treating, controlling and monitoring risk as part of product development or product management.

Business risks
Business risk refers to a threat to the company’s ability to achieve its financial goals. In business, risk means that a company’s or an organization’s plans may not turn out as originally planned or that it may not meet its target.

Examples of risks in the software process.

• Estimation and scheduling
• The sudden growth in requirements
• Employee turnover
• Breakdown of specification
• Productivity issues
• Compromising on designs
• Gold plating
• Procedural risks
• Technical risks
• Unavoidable risks

1.Estimation and scheduling
The unique nature of individual software projects creates problems for developers and managers in estimating and scheduling development time. Always monitor existing projects so that you apply lessons learned in the future.

2. The sudden growth in requirements
As a project progresses, issues that are not identified earlier can create a last-minute hurdle to meeting deadlines. Try to think big early on in the project, and anticipate the worst-case or heaviest-use scenario.

3. Employee turnover
Every project has a number of developers working on it. When a developer leaves, he or she may take critical information with him/her. This can delay, and sometimes derail an entire project. Ensure you have resources where team members can collaborate and share knowledge.

4. Breakdown of specification
During the initial phases of integration and coding, requirements might conflict. Moreover, developers may find that even the specification is unclear or incomplete.

5. Productivity issues
On projects involving long timelines, developers tend to take things easy, to begin with. As a result, sometimes, they lose significant time to complete the project. Set a realistic schedule, and stick to it.

6. Compromising on designs
In order to get stuck into the next ‘real’ tasks, developers tend to rush the design process. This is a waste of programming hours, as designing is the most critical part of software development.

7. Gold plating
Developers sometimes like to show off their skills by adding unnecessary features. For instance, a developer might add Flash to a basic login module to make it look ‘stylish’. Again, this is a waste of programming hours.

8. Procedural risks
Day-to-day operational activities might hamper due to improper process implementation, conflicting priorities, or a lack of clarity in responsibilities.

9. Technical risks
Sometimes software development firms reduce the functionality of the software to compensate for overruns pertaining to high budgets and schedules. There is always a conflict between achieving maximum functionality of the software and peak performance.

10. Unavoidable risks
These include changes in government policy, the obsolescence of software, or other risks that cannot be controlled or estimated. As the field of software development becomes more and more complex, the risks associated with it have intensified.

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