RiskStorming workshops

Whole-Team Quality Responsibility.

Risk Analysis.

An Integral Part of any Quality Coach’s toolset.

 

RiskStorming workshops, now Online!
Interactive & Asynchronous

Why RiskStorming?

Online RiskStorming

  • Deliver quality cost-efficiently
  • Identify high value risks
  • Make quality a team responsibility

How it works

Phase 1 – Choose Quality Aspects

Choosing is loosing. Out of 25 different quality aspects the team decides which 6 are the most important ones. It’s a discussion of trade-offs and prioritisation. At the end, everyone has a better understanding of what’s important.

Phase 2 – Identify Risks

Once the team has agreed on what’s important, they can now identify that which might endanger it. Identify together which threats and possible negative outcomes may determin the fate of your project.

Phase 3 – Dealing with Risks

Knowing which possible threats could harm you is already a key success factor for your project. The question of what you’ll put in place that these risks don’t happen, or the measures you will take to better deal with the risks will play a huge factor in both the quality and value of your product as the survival of your project.

Phase 4 – A Plan

The true value of RiskStorming lies in the discussion itself and the sharing of knowledge that happens while you work together to solve a common problem. However, memories are fleeting and good intentions often forgotten. By keeping a list of action points and documenting the ‘why’ the outcome of this workshop can be tracked and referred to.

Let us help you get started

Our instructors have a thorough background in quality and testing and have facilitated many Riskstorming sessions already. Whether you’re taking your first steps in creating a quality plan or have need of an expert, we can support you. Learn Riskstorming Online from true masters.

Pricing Plans

Who are we?

KZA B.V.

QA and Testing

Netherlands

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Dutch, English

Ard Kramer

Qualisopher

Rotterdam, Netherlands

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Dutch, English

oose

Innovative Informatik eG

Hamburg, Germany

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German, English

Beren Van Daele

Quality Coach

Europe

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Dutch, English

Vernon Richards

Quality Coach

Leicester, UK

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English

Andrea Jensen

Software Quality Engineer

Germany

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German, English

General Questions

FAQ

When is the best time to do a RiskStorming Online Workshop?
RiskStorming’s optimal moment is between the conception and building. In other words: after you can explain the chosen solution and before a letter of code is written.
Alternatively, you can run RiskStorming workshops later than this, but you might not enjoy the outcome as much. Risks could be identified too late for good countermeasures to be taken. Instead of not building a risky feature, you may be stuck with spending hours of testing it.
Then again, forewarned is forearmed, the earlier the better. 
How long does a session take?
The longest sessions we’ve run was 4 hours. This is with people who don’t know the application yet, don’t know each other, nor the format, nor the concepts featured in the workshop. Lots of new stuff to be trudged through.

The shortest session we’ve run was 1 hour. People knew what the subject matter was and how the team worked. The discussions were much more targetted and the outcome absolutely stellar.

Your milleage will varry. Count between 2-3 hours to do it effectively for the first time.

Who should be present?
The short answer: anyone who has a stake in the quality of your product. 4-7 people can make the most speed.
The long answer: It depends on the context of your project. Look for people who have deep understanding of the business, the architecture and which negative scenario’s could happen. Some projects are marketing heavy, others are very data dependent, invite those who’ll give you good ideas on where the value is and what you need to protect.
Look for four types of people: a business expert, an architectect/developer with broad skills, someone with a tester mindset and someone with experience in running applications in production. This kind of team will come up with the most well-rounded strategy.

Contact

Let’s work together!

RiskStormingOnline is a product built by many beautiful minds. Your point of contact is Beren Van Daele who helps the team with which step to take next. He’ll gladly help you out and have a chat with you.

beren@isleof.it

calendly.com/berenvd

Our History

MinistryOfTesting
TestBash Brighton’s 99-second-talks are famous to kickstart great ideas. During his 99-seconds, Beren showed his poorly designed card deck and asked if anyone would help him.
Ministry of Testing offered to fund & cocreate the cards together with multiple members from the community.
Several months later TestSphere was born.

TestSphere is a card deck that gets people thinking and talking about Quality & Testing.

It became quite popular in the testing field, with decks going across the globe to help people improve their understanding and quality of the project.
RiskStorming is a hands-on workshop that was created through experimenting with TestSphere by Andreas, Marcel & Beren.
This brought us to where we are now: on a journey to spread RiskStorming beyond the software testing craft and into analysis, development, architecture and operations too, so you’re better equiped to deal with your important risks.

Testimonials

With everyone working remotely, we need more tools to help us have good conversations. Get the team together on video to identify risks around upcoming changes with a virtually facilitated riskstorming session. It’s a great way to promote lateral thinking and creative testing approaches.
Lisa Crispin

Quality Owner

At eBay, we use RiskStorming regularly before we start a new project. This helps us to generate a common understanding between the different stakeholders, increase the understanding of what’s important to different people, and of course identify risks. We usually identify lots of new risks that we haven’t thought of before and we can then decide as a team how to mitigate them. Overall, I can highly recommend using RiskStorming in your project.

Jan Eumann

Head of Testing - eBay

Riskstorming is a great exercise. I find a lot of teams have biases where they prioritise risks explicitly linked to features, or risks they’ve worked with before. Riskstorming enables teams to explore and prioritise risks that might not have been considered. Discussing these also facilitates knowledge share across the team in a way that is fun and doesn’t feel forced. I’m really excited for the online version!
Gem Hill

Senior Tester - BBC

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