Risk Management
Risk management is the coordinated process of identifying, analyzing, evaluating, controlling, and monitoring risks throughout a project's lifecycle.
“The process for handling risks.”
(Definition reproduced from the ISTQB Glossary. Copyright belongs to ISTQB.)
View the complete ISTQB GlossaryWhat is Risk Management?
The objective is to reduce the likelihood or impact of risks while supporting informed decision-making and successful project outcomes.
Continuous process: Risks are managed throughout the project.
Decision support: Guides planning and prioritization.
Risk reduction: Focuses on minimizing threats and maximizing opportunities.
Real World Example
A team building an online tax filing service identifies dozens of potential risks — calculation errors, security gaps, downtime during filing deadline week — and writes them all into a document at kickoff.
The list is never revisited, so testing effort ends up spread evenly across every risk regardless of likelihood or impact, and nobody notices when a mid-project change to tax law quietly introduces a brand-new risk the original list never anticipated.
The test manager puts real Risk management in place: analyzing each risk's likelihood and impact (a calculation defect during peak filing week is catastrophic, a rarely used settings screen is not), prioritizing test depth accordingly, and revisiting the risk list as the project and tax law evolve.
Focused testing catches the high-impact calculation risk well before deadline week, and the team immediately adapts test priorities when the tax law changes mid-project — because Risk management was treated as a continuous process, not a document written once and forgotten.
Practice Questions
Question 1
A team lists dozens of potential risks for a tax filing service in a document at project kickoff, but the list is never revisited, and testing effort is spread evenly regardless of each risk's likelihood or impact. What is missing?
Question 2
Which activity is MOST representative of risk management as an ongoing process, rather than a one-time exercise?
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