Managing Risk on Iterative Developments
Posted By Paul Below on Wed, 2009-08-05 16:45<< Finding Defects Efficiently | Main | An Empirical Examination of Brooks' Law >>
Managing risk for a single project is a fairly well understood problem. If the project contains multiple releases and they are independent, risk management remains fairly straightforward:
A software development project is going to proceed concurrently with the development of a new piece of hardware required to implement the software. Scheduled completion dates for both developments have been determined and a project plan has been created. Both projects can proceed independently until their respective completions (probably an unwarranted assumption, but this is a simple example!). Both projects must succeed in order for overall success to be achieved.
But the simplest case is rarely what project managers encounter in real life, where releases have complex dependencies. How can busy managers assess the probability of delivering on time on project containing multiple releases or iterations that are not independent?
