Make The Safest Process That Could Possibly Work

There are many techniques that go to make up a development process. Try to pick the ones that, in combination, best reduce the risks inherent in your development context.

Of course, safety has to be balanced against cost and available resources. Do we want to spend $10,000 to protect ourselves from a problem that has a 1% chance of occurring within the next five years? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. --MG

Yes, this one is too simple; it was intended as a stalking horse, but a marauding pack of straw dogs took it down before anyone had a chance to stalk it much. There be tradeoffs, and not always dollar ones; a one-developer garage is a cheaper and safer software development than a one-hundred-person monolith. Risk is also directly related to how you assess risk - see BodyFollowsEyes. --PeterMerel