Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects

16. Incrementalism for Risk Mitigation

Risk mitigation comprises the full set of early actions you can take to make it possible later on to deal effectively (quickly, cheaply) with a risk, should it materialize.

All mitigation incurs cost and delay in the present in order to cope with possible risk manifestations later. It makes the rosy scenario somewhat less rosy, since if the risk fails to materialize, the mitigation cost might seem to have been wasted.

A bang-per-buck analysis of various risk mitigation strategies would go like this: Your bang is some weighted assessment of reduced cost and delay in coping with likely risk manifestations, and your buck is the cost and delay associated with mitigation itself. The best bang-per-buck risk mitigation ...