Risk Mitigation Approach

The project objectives were to implement additional functionality to the existing internet application. The new application features were: bulk sms, sms subscriptions, a free sms sending feature with advertising rotation, mobile content sharing and premium sms billing. The estimated project cost was 1180 staff-hours, the schedule -- 4 months. The main technologies were Java, Flex and PHP.

One of the first steps at the project start was deep risk analysis. More than 100 project risks were identified and assessed. Mitigation and contingency plans were created for the top 20 risks. One of the most interesting risk mitigation plans is described below.

Existing software was delivered to us "as is", with no deployment process. There was a risk that manual deployment of every new build would cause great cost and schedule losses.

The mitigation plan was to investigate used technologies and adjust the continuous integration process for the whole project. We found appropriable tools (NAnt and Maven) and completed the solution.

As a result, our team members just had to commit source code to the repository. And in some minutes the compiled build was unit tested, auto-deployed and auto tested. This was a very efficient tool to develop this project on.