Conversations about quality become an examination of what matters, rather than a struggle over who cares about excellence and who doesn't. Another great thing about it is that it incorporates the quality assurance and problem finding roles of testing. Just by bringing the developers in on the risk analysis, they can see how perhaps changing something about how they work might reduce the need for testing their work. The most compelling benefit of risk-based thinking is that it lets us scale the test effort, dynamically, to fit the situation. Instead, we do each task if and only if we believe that not doing it, in the situation at hand , would either cause or fail to control an important problem.
Risk is important, but it's also kind of an abstract concept, and a downbeat one at that.
One development manager told me he didn't like talking about risk. It sounds so negative. Hey, we aren't insurance actuaries, we're entrepreneurs. We take risks. He had a point.