• risk: nature of software
• risk: team dynamics
• risk: roles
• risk: resources
• risk: analysis
• risk: architecture
• risk: design
• risk: implemention
• risk: quality assurance
• risk: project management
• risk: technologies
• risk: tools

One common error which introduces significant risk is to neglect to set up a deployment stack. This refers to environments where the software is deployed. For example, the minimum viable stack to mitigate risk would be:

• Local (local environment where the developer constructs code)
• Test (an environment where QA engineers can test the software)
• Prod (production environment where end users access the software)

A common stack would be as follows:

• Local (local environment where the developer constructs code)
• Dev (an environment where coders can do integration testing prior to promoting to Test)
• Test (an environment where QA engineers can test the software)
• Stage (a production like environment where QA can evaluate from an end user perspective)
• Prod (production environment where end users access the software)

Many companies have been damaged by disasterous low quality releases. These situations usually have multiple causes, but the lack of a proper deployment stack is usually a big factor. To be effective, systems with multiple components should reproduce these in each environment.

Another common error is to take a risky shortcut and populate lower environments with production data. For confidentiality reasons, coders and testers should have limited access to end user data. For software that communicates to the end user (email, sms, notification), this error makes it too easy for normal development work to result in a message to the end user. To mitigate this risk, the development team may need to create test data generators.