# Risk Assessment - deciding how to manage your software

## TL;DR
Use a risk assessment to help choose the appropriate sustainable software concepts for your project. Too little and your software is unsustainable; too much and you won’t be able to Get On With It. It can take just a few seconds, but gets you off on the right foot.

## Longer read…
We all use risk assessments all the time. Sometimes they’re formal procedures to ensure an activity is safe, but most of the time they’re the thought of a moment- Is this coffee too hot? Is there a bus coming? Software is no different, and using a risk assessment approach like the one described below can really help make your work successful and sustainable.

### The risk matrix
A risk matrix is a very popular way of quantifying what’s going on with the thing you’re interested in. One axis measures exposure in some way, and the other the impact of a mishap. The further from the origin, the more safeguards are needed to make the risk acceptable.

![Impact vs complexity risk matrix](../../figures/risk_matrix.png)

In our case, we will use ‘complexity’ and ‘impact’ as the two axes. Some case studies illustrate how it works…

Case 1

> Richard needs to submit a 100 small jobs to the department cluster, with the names of the jobs varying according to a simple pattern. This is tedious and he wants to go outside and play. Therefore, Richard decides to write a short shell script to submit all the jobs. He pauses for a few seconds and asks:

> How complicated is this? It’ll only be about 1 screen of text.

> What’s if it goes wrong? The jobs won’t submit or run and I’ll get some failure emails.

## Prerequisites/recommended skill level
> This needs writing

## Summary
Use a risk assessment to help choose the appropriate sustainable software concepts for your project.
Too little and your software is unsustainable; too much and you won’t be able to Get On With It.
It can take just a few seconds, but gets you off on the right foot.

## How this will help you/why this is useful
> This needs writing