Towards integrating agile development and risk management
Jaana Nyfjord · 2008
Risk management has become recognized as a best practice in the software industry. Controlling risks improves essential software development features such as product quality, planning precision and cost-efficiency. For this rea-son, the inclusion of risk management in software development is an impor-tant factor to consider if one wishes to achieve project success. Agile models claim to be risk-driven. They state that their iterative ap-proach enables continuous attention to risks and that the risks can be reduced by practices such as continuous software integration and early testing. In reality, however, the agile development models implement few risk man-agement practices. The research problem addressed in this thesis is multi-faceted. The prob-lem concerns the lack of explicit risk management practices in agile devel-opment. However, it also concerns the need to address risk management on an organization-wide basis. In addition, it concerns the conflict that emerges from trying to merge the agile process with standard industrial processes, such as risk management, without compromising agility. The goal of this thesis is to explore integration as a solution for address-ing the lack of risk management in the agile model based on empirical re-search. It involves (a) outlining a model integrating the agile and risk man-agement processes on an organization-wide basis, and (b) providing a foun-dation for its extension. The results show that, within the scope of this research, the proposed so-lution is a valid candidate for improving the agile situation. However, it is still in its infancy. It does not claim to be complete but needs to be further elaborated and complemented with details. Hence, we outline the model and provide a foundation established in empirical investigation for extending it in future research.