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Scarcity Risk

Scarcity Risk is about quantities of a dependency, and specifically, not having enough.

Part Of

Reduced By Practices

  • Demand Management: Helps in efficiently allocating resources to meet the demand without overburdening the team.

Attendant To Practices

  • Prioritising: Prioritization can create dependencies on specific tasks or features.

While Reliability Risk (which we met in the previous section) considers what happens when a single dependency is unreliable, scarcity is about quantities of a dependency, and specifically, not having enough.

In the previous section we talked about the reliability of the bus: it will either arrive or it won't. But what if, when it arrives, it's already full of passengers? There is a scarcity of seats: you don't much care which seat you get on the bus, you just need one. Let's term this Scarcity Risk, the risk of not being able to access a dependency in a timely fashion due to its scarcity.

Any resource (such as disk space, oxygen, concert tickets, time or pizza) that you depend on can suffer from scarcity, and here, we're going to look at five particular types, relevant to software.

Types Of Scarcity Risk​