A Review of Risk Management in Agile Development

Context: Agile Software Development (ASD) has been in practice since past two decades. It has come a long way in order to overcome many limitations that existed in traditional methods. Software development is inherently a risk prone activity. Risk Management (RM) has been part of software development life cycle (SDLC) for a long time, especially in traditional methodology. ASD does not strictly follow a traditional style of project management; thus, RM phases are also not that much well established. Objective: In this study we aimed at finding and summarizing the latest work and trends in context of ASD and RM. The better the management of risks, the greater are the chances of project success. Method: We have selected 12 relevant studies to perform a technical review on the subject. Carefully chose studies were based on well-defined inclusion criteria to ensure the credibility of analysis and deducted results. Conclusions: We presented the existing work on the subject synthesized the main themes of the studies. We discussed the RM integration in ASD, adoption risks, scalability risks, risk analysis, frameworks and RM approaches. We summarized the contributions, strengths and other aspect of the studies.