ICS 125: Typical risks in development

Build the wrong product
- Mis-identified customer
- Misunderstood requirements: functional, non-functional
- Mis-prioritized requirements
- Misunderstood competition, sales process, or laws
Build a defective product
- Choose/reused defective subcomponents or technologies
- Wrote defective code
- Failed to find and fix defects, keep introducing new defects
Overrun planned schedule and cost
- Left out needed development steps
- Left out or underestimated capital costs
- Mis-estimated effort on known tasks
- Miscounted or lost development resources
- Mis-estimated effort on unknown tasks (e.g., projected defects)
- Misunderstood dependencies between tasks
- Mis-prioritized tasks
Underachieve projected revenue
- Not enough customers
- Forced to lower price
- Underestimated the cost/time of making each sale
- Underestimated the cost of deployment and technical support