1

Identify High Risk Quality of Service Requirements

• Examine usability requirements. Determine if the user interface is key to customer acceptance of the application.
• Examine reliability requirements. Determine if the application is mission critical or has life threatening consequences if it fails.
• Examine performance requirements. Determine if functionality like high throughput and low response times are important in the application.

2

Examine Scenarios

• Examine scenarios and identify potential areas of risk.
• Identify complex user interactions or complex business rules or algorithms.
• Identify dependencies on supporting systems that are out of the user’s control, such as 3rd party Web services.
• Identify ambiguous user requirements.

3

Explore Integration Issues

• Look at 3rd party libraries the application may use. Determine if the library is unproven. If so, determine unknown aspects of the library that need to be explored.
• Look for interfaces between systems that may carry risk, such as inter-process communication between new hardware and legacy systems.

4

Create and Prioritize Risks

• Create a new risk work item if any of these areas present a risk that could prove detrimental to the project. Understand the potential downside from a risk that has materialized and describe it in the work item.
• If the risk is technical and can be addressed through prototyping, assign high probability, high cost items to an architect to mitigate in the next iteration.
• If the risk is organizational, assign the risk to the project manager or other team member who owns the task of mitigating the risk.

All of the known risks have been documented and assigned.