Mobile App Design Risk Assessment & Management 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A mobile app's push notification feature depends on a single cloud provider's messaging service. The design team should flag this as:
- A feature enhancement opportunity
- A single point of failure risk (Correct answer)
- A user acquisition risk
- A localization risk
Correct answer: A single point of failure risk
Relying on a single service for a critical feature creates a single point of failure, where one outage disrupts the entire notification system.
Question 2: A startup mobile app team chooses to launch without a formal risk assessment to meet an aggressive deadline. This decision exemplifies:
- Risk avoidance
- Risk acceptance (knowingly accepting risk) (Correct answer)
- Risk transfer
- Risk elimination
Correct answer: Risk acceptance (knowingly accepting risk)
Knowingly proceeding without mitigating identified or likely risks in order to meet a deadline is a form of risk acceptance.
Question 3: During user research, an app team discovers that 40% of target users have low digital literacy. Ignoring this finding creates which risk?
- Performance risk
- Usability and adoption risk (Correct answer)
- Legal risk
- Backend scalability risk
Correct answer: Usability and adoption risk
Designing an app that doesn't account for users' digital literacy level creates usability risk, leading to poor adoption and high abandonment rates.
Question 4: What is 'residual risk' in the context of mobile app risk management?
- The risk that remains after all mitigation measures have been applied (Correct answer)
- The initial risk score before any analysis
- Risk introduced by third-party libraries only
- Risk that only appears after app launch
Correct answer: The risk that remains after all mitigation measures have been applied
Residual risk is the level of risk that still exists after the team has implemented all planned risk mitigation strategies.
Question 5: An app team uses feature flags to roll out a new payment flow to 5% of users first. Which risk management technique does this represent?
- Risk avoidance
- Controlled risk exposure / phased rollout (Correct answer)
- Risk transfer to users
- Contingency planning
Correct answer: Controlled risk exposure / phased rollout
A phased rollout using feature flags limits the blast radius of potential failures by exposing only a small percentage of users to new, unproven code.
Question 6: Which scenario best illustrates 'scope creep risk' in mobile app design?
- A backend API becomes unavailable unexpectedly
- Stakeholders continuously add new features without adjusting the timeline or budget (Correct answer)
- The app crashes on specific Android devices
- A competitor launches a similar product
Correct answer: Stakeholders continuously add new features without adjusting the timeline or budget
Scope creep risk occurs when uncontrolled expansion of project features without corresponding resource adjustments threatens delivery quality and timeline.
Question 7: A mobile app development team creates automated rollback procedures to quickly revert a bad release. This is an example of which risk strategy?
- Risk avoidance
- Contingency planning (Correct answer)
- Risk transfer
- Qualitative analysis
Correct answer: Contingency planning
Contingency planning involves preparing specific response actions in advance so that when a risk event occurs, the team can react quickly and effectively.
Mobile App Design Risk Assessment & Management 4
A mobile app's push notification feature depends on a single cloud provider's messaging service.
The design team should flag this as: