Lean Learning of Risks in Students’ Agile Teams

Risk—the possibility of resulting in an unsatisfactory outcome—is an important driving force for a software development project to progress. Although techniques like identifying a project’s top-10 risk items are taught commonly in software engineering courses, little work has been carried out to examine how students working in agile teams perceive and mitigate the risks over multiple software development cycles. In this chapter, we summarize our recent work where we discovered the collaborative nature of students’ risk management strategies. Furthermore, we show that students also followed lean practices by wasting little effort on non-actionable risks. Linking collaboration and waste-elimination provided additional insights into teaching a wider range of lean principles in agile settings, e.g., students should deliver as fast as possible the non-collaborative risk mitigations but should decide as late as possible when facing interdependent mitigations.