Using Visual Risk Assessment to Uncover Subtle Team Performance Issues

Developing software systems is predominantly a team endeavour. The importance of the team is heightened when using an agile development approach that relies on open and frequent communication between team members. It is important for software companies to assess their readiness for an agile development approach and this necessarily includes an assessment of the performance of their teams. This work-in-progress report presents an approach for assessing key software engineering risks in relation to agile or plan-driven development approaches. Importantly, this assessment can be used to uncover subtle team performance issues which have a bearing on how well a particular development approach can be enacted. Assessments performed to date suggest a sufficiently good correlation of subjective rating and actual team performance.

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