Tim Lister has “often said that risk management is project management for adults,” and now he adds that “Agile Methods address many of the most common software risks,” in Adult Behavior on Projects:
I think of software projects as journeys into the uncertain. As we begin we may not know exactly what we are to build, we may not know what is the most appropriate technology to build it with, and therefore we aren’t sure what skills we’ll need, and add that up and we are very unsure of how long a journey we will take. The odd thing is that many people are very certain of when we will be done. The deadline is very often set before the system is specified. At face value, this is comical, but what is happening is that the organization is trying rather clumsily to set a project goal or a project constraint.