The software development world is crowded with different practices, metrics, methodologies, tools and techniques.

For example, metrics such as “number of open tickets”, “code coverage" or "release cadence" give us a numerical feel for how things are going, and methodologies such as Scrum, Waterfall and Lean give us different approaches to organising.

But what unites them all?

The Risk-First perspective is that all of these practices and methodologies have at their heart the job of managing different risks. Risk isn't something that just appears in a report, it actually drives everything we do:

• A story about improving the user login screen can be seen as reducing the risk of users not signing up.
• If we write unit tests, we’re tackling the risk of bugs going to production, but we’re also defending against the risk of future changes breaking our existing functionality.
• A task about improving the health indicators could be seen as addressing the risk of the application failing and no-one reacting to it.
• Implementing a new function in the application is fixing the risk that users are dissatisfied and go elsewhere.

Risk-First makes the case that better understanding the nature of these risks is critical to building software in the complex, interconnected domain we work in.

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The second edition of the Risk-First book is being published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf! You can currently get it for free! Click here for more details: https://riskfirst.org/Risk-First-Second-Edition.