A New Risk Assessment Approach for Agile Projects

Agile is a successful project management mindset developed by the software industry which recently has been extrapolated for other industries. This mindset has been promoting the use and development of several tools that aim to minimize risks associated to the project output, i.e., in Agile the user requirements are the major priority and the risk associated to these requirements is strongly mitigated using tools like Scrum or Kanban. However, risk analysis in Agile projects has an implicit nature without well-defined and systematic methods. This feature was inherited from the software industry where this implicit approach works well, but for industries different from those that develop software it creates serious drawbacks. In fact, the risk associated to the project itself, or in other words, the risk associated to the Agile team capability to implement and manage a given project is not explicitly analyzed in Agile methods. Moreover, the Agile risk mitigation approach do not consider this important point of view in risk management. In this sense, important risk factors have been omitted, risk factors such as scope creep, unrealistic expectations, lack of cooperation, or lack of communication are some of these factors that have been overlooked despite their strong impact on Agile projects. This paper proposes a new approach to perform risk assessment and management of Agile projects. The approach comprises a set of qualitative risk tools inline with the Agile way of doing things, i.e., the proposed model does not jeopardize the flexibility found in Agile methods so appreciated by Agile team members, but at the same time, the proposed model introduces a systematic way of risk analysis which absence in Agile projects has been criticize in literature.