Tracking risks in GreenHopper

[Neil Padgen]

Does anyone use GreenHopper for tracking risks? How do you manage them?

I'm thinking of creating a new issue type of "Risk" and allowing risks to be added for review during Sprints and at the Sprint Review / Sprint Planning meetings. Not sure whether this is a good way to do things though.

Any tips and advice on agile risk management in GreenHopper would be appreciated. Thanks!

[David Toussaint [Communardo]]

What D mean by "tracking risks"? Are speaking of listing all risks for a project besides its feautures or are you more speaking of attaching the infrmation of the scope of risks to regular tickets (i.e. features)?

For the first one you could just use your approach. For the latter one you could e.g. add a new field "riskiness" to your issues and use this as estimation field in the corresponding board. You could than use collunm constraints in order to highligt the columns that are more risky than the are supposed to be.

Does this help?

[Neil Padgen]

I'm having to run Scrum within a PRINCE2 environment. We're treating each Sprint as a PRINCE2 task, but the project manager wants to keep a risk register. I've struggled in the past with differentiating backlog tasks (things that have to be done) with what we've called "qualities" - these might belong in the definition of done.

I think there are two sorts of risks, as you point out. There are overall project risks regarding to the approach (eg "lack of a common vocabulary between product owner and development team may mean the product is not understood") - and risks on particular tasks (eg "this import task may take more time than is available").

But I suspect that having new "risk" issues would help in risk analysis, as we could add "description", "mitigation", "probability" and "impact" fields to each risk.