Risk is the Water in Which the Agile Fish Swims

At our CSM Plus class last week, someone asked how Scrum projects manage risk. We answered with some examples and some would-be pithy wisdom.

Then I heard myself say “Risk is the water in which the Scrum fish swims.” Anything that hokey must be preserved, and here it is. Still, the phrase does capture an essential point, which is that most everything about an Agile process like Scrum deals automatically with risk.

We bring all the necessary contributors to the project together: stakeholders, testers, developers. Everyone.

We build real software in short iterations, based on the product owner’s current understanding of what’s important. We treat the resulting software not as a final answer, but as the next step in discovering and deciding what the software should be.

We see what works, and what doesn’t work. If something seems scary, we work on it, learning whether it is scary and what to do about it.

Swim, little fishies, swim.