No matter how careful your testing, no matter how complete your review, there is a non-zero probability that releasing your new code will expose a problem. The last phase of risk management is handling a risk that actually manifests. At the end of the last post, I mentioned the importance of post-release testing and an… Read More »
You’ve carefully assessed the risks in your new system. You’ve considered the implementation and eliminated bad implementation decisions and removed unnecessary features that involved extra risk. Considering the result, you note that there is still risk. So, what do you do? You try to mitigate the remaining risk. Risk mitigation does not remove the risk… Read More »
Many people doing risk management assert that you cannot eliminate risk. Those people are partly right. If you are willing to modify the functionality of a program or system, you can eliminate some kinds of risk, Obviously, this is much easier early in the design or implementation of a system. Trade-offs to Eliminate Risk Part… Read More »
One way to think about risk is to decide if a feature is naturally risky, or if the risk is a result of the implementation of the feature. Stealing some terminology from the description of software complexity, I call these Inherent Risk and Accidental Risk. Risk Creep Sometimes unnecessary risk creeps into a system through… Read More »
When developing software, there are many different dimensions of risk you might consider. There is an enormous amount of information available on Risk Assessment, consider this to just quickly skimming over the topic. Depending on your understanding of risk (or your paranoia), trying to assess risk can be a difficult task. There are several approaches… Read More »
Any project or software includes potential risks. Will it do the job or fail? Will it leak user information? Will it serve as a springboard for attacking other systems? When you realize the need to learn how risky your software is, there are a number of approaches to assessing that risk. If a piece of… Read More »