Explaining Software Project Risks in Agile Teams: An Action Case using Causal Mapping

Agile teams must deal with many risks to their software project’s resources and schedule. This challenge is exacerbated in large-scale agile development by the increasingly specialized team roles with inherently different explanations of the software project’s risks. Against this backdrop, we report an action case study of how an agile team can understand and manage different explanations of their project risks. We used the causal mapping technique to understand how a team’s six different roles explain their software project risks and assessed these maps’ usefulness with the team. From this action case study, we present two findings. First, causal mapping is useful for revealing role-specific explanations of software project risks in agile teams. Second, agile teams can use role-specific causal maps to juxtapose their explanations of software project risks. We discuss how these findings imply a caveat for agile teams seeking to understand and manage team-generalized software project risks and ignoring idiosyncratic explanations of software project risks.