It’s All About Risk

One of the original proponents of the Agile Manifesto, Kent Beck states in his book:

“It’s all about risk” - Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

This is a promising start. From there, he introduces his methodology, Extreme Programming, and explains how you can adopt it in your team, the features to observe and the characteristics of success and failure. However, while Risk has clearly driven the conception of Extreme Programming, there is no clear model of software risk underpinning the work.

Risk-First introduces a model of software risk. This means that we can properly analyse Extreme Programming (and Scrum, Waterfall, Lean and all the others) and understand what drives them. Since they are designed to deliver successful software projects, they must be about managing risks, and we will uncover exactly which risks and how they do it.