Identifying the risks in agile testing

Risk identification in Agile Risk Management:
It is very essential to identify risk in projects in order to control them. There are different types of techniques that can be used in identifying risks. Few of the popular risk identification techniques used by agile practitioners are: exhaustive risk checklists, review of documents, analysis of assumptions and constraints and so on.  As the project manager encourages the entire agile team to identify the risks involve, he or she should also provide them the guidelines to be followed in risk identification in order to achieve the goal of controlling and minimizing risk. Below are the guidelines that need to be considered by the agile team members while identifying risk in agile risk management.

In the initial stage of agile project development, the agile team and the product manager discusses about the requirements and the cases that might arise while delivering them. At the time of analyzing the requirements, team members should start thinking about the risks involved in implementation of the requirements.

In the estimation process of agile project development, team should estimate the size of stories. They should consider the granularity of the stories because the larger the stories, the bigger is the risks involved.  The process of identifying risk starts since iteration planning itself. The agile team should be accepting work that they are confident for reducing the risk of failure.

The agile team members should bring up issues having an impact in their work process during every stand-up meeting. Thereafter they should discuss further to take appropriate mitigating actions.  Team members working on an agile project should discuss and clarify about risks with the stakeholders during every iteration review.

The team must reflect on the state of the project, the experiences that they had during the iteration and find tune for the assessment of the risks involved.
Risk Assessment in Agile Risk Management:
The next step that comes after identification of risk in project risk management is risk assessment. In this process of risk assessment, acknowledging the broad risk categories can be helpful. A broad categorization can be business risk, technological risks and logistical risk. One of such popular categorization is called PESTLE.
PESTLE: Political Risks – Arise of Political influences that govern a project
PESTLE: Environmental Risks
PESTLE: Social Risks
PESTLE: Risks rising our of Technology
PESTLE: Risks arising of Legal standpoint
PESTLE: Economic Risks

Here are some effective risk assessment techniques used by agile practitioners in the process of agile project management.