05 Team : Identifying Risks
Objectives
Identify potential risks in your team project.
Risk Assessment
As you begin to think about the major components of your team projects, you will likely have pieces that you are very familiar with (or have done something similar before) and also some elements that are a little more unknown.
The parts that are familiar may still take a lot of time to complete, but they are less risky to your project, because you know that you can accomplish them, you just need to put the time in.
On the other hand, the unknown pieces could turn out to be anything from very easy to very difficult or even impossible with the technology at your disposal. A major part of successful project development is to be able to identify these risks early on and find ways to mitigate them.
Your task this week is to work together as a team to identify the pieces of your project that are the biggest risks or the most unknown. Android development is obviously unknown to almost everyone, but we will work through that together. The risks to focus on here are those that are unique to your project. For instance, do you need to analyze music or images in real time? Do you need to use a web service or API, or store/access data in the cloud? Do you need to process data from sensors on the device in a non-trivial way? Do you need to manipulate files in a specific file format that is unfamiliar to you?
As a team, identify the biggest risks to your project and your plan to mitigate these risks. For example, you might list that you need to do research, such as look up an algorithm or discover the third-party APIs that are available (including their terms and services); or you may need to do a simple proof-of-concept test of something in a console Java application.
Example
The risk document should be pretty simple. Something along the lines of:
Risk Identification for Team 06
1. Our application will require storing data in the cloud, and none of us have any experience working with cloud storage.
Plan for mitigation: John has taken the task to research cloud storage and give a short fifteen minute overview of how it works at our next team meeting.
2. Our application requires users to log in to a secure system and post photos of their cats. None of us have ever worked with user authentication before, and none of us have a cat.
Plan for mitigation: Bob's sister has a cat we can borrow, and Steve is going to research user authentication and give a short fifteen minute overview of the best approach at our next team meeting.
3. We're planning on adding some location-aware features, but none of us have experience with the location APIs.
Plan for mitigation: Sally has found some YouTube videos on location-aware APIs in Android and is going to put together a small prototype project that uses them so that we can see how they work. She'll have this ready in two weeks.
4. etc...
Note how each identified risk has been assigned to a team member for investigation, and a specific action item and deadline are given. This pattern should be followed throughout your project.
Submission
Submit to I-Learn your list of risks you've identified along with your plan to mitigate each one. Next week, you will follow that plan and actually do the research or write the proof of concept code, whereas this week, you are only listing them.