Agile Commitments: Enhancing Business Risk Management in Agile Development Projects

Agile methods focus on customer satisfaction and delivering business value early, however if flexibility and adaptability are not managed during the development project, agile methods could not assure achieving the overall business expectations. Customers require risk visibility over the main aspects that define its expectations: functionality (scope), budget, time-to-market, and product quality. These risks must be controlled and monitored during the project in order to introduce mitigation actions if needed. In this article, we propose an agile commitments framework based on the definition and follow-up of commitments between customer and developer. This framework aims to improving risk management by enhancing business expectation risk visibility, and also providing a negotiation baseline between customers and developers.