Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

High Risk First

In agile, we obviously want to complete capabilities that are of high value to the customer first. It is also important that teams prioritize high-risk items early. If you are implementing a new technology, re-architecting some critical part of the product, making significant changes to the database, and so forth, these items should be addressed early in the project so that you discover the challenging problems while there is enough time to fix them, and can test long enough to have confidence in the solution.

This sounds obvious, but many teams do not take this approach or, if they do, they tend to complete the coding first and leave the hard testing for later. Teams should always identify any high-risk areas at the beginning ...