The risk manifests itself in various ways – the risk attached to not meeting a business deadline or delivery, the risk at all stages of development cycle like poor understanding of requirements, inflexible and unresponsive design, developers unfamiliarity with problem domain or even new technology, lack of availability of required resources, attritional team dynamics etc, the risk attached to budgetary, organisational and time constraints, the risk stemming from size, complexity, change and so on. Mitigating these risks and delivering a system to budget, on time and meeting the specification is the essence of project management so, unsurprisingly, risk-management should be a core concept in development methodologies.
Iteration refines understanding through feedback and eliminates risk. The completeness and accuracy of requirement capture can be checked through prototyping thus reduces risk of project failure. The cost of early discovery is cheap. Algorithm, workflow, human-computer interface, alternative designs, stress-testing, package suitability etc can be prototyped and checked against objectives till they meet the need. The complexity and largeness never becomes overwhelming because of multiple development cycles in iterative approach. The final solution shouldn’t come as a surprise to users as the solution would have been implemented in stages and with user approval.
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