Agile Development and the role of a Business Analyst

Business Analysts are a vital part of any agile team. They liaison with all the key project stakeholders and help projects run smoothly in an agile environment. Business Analysts facilitate dialogue about the customer value with the team, prioritize the key slices of value and help the agile teams embrace the value-driven development of the product.

The Role of a BA in Agile Teams

At the end of the day delivering a product that fulfill all the customer needs and is built in a timely fashion. Agile embraces change and BA's (Business Analysts) bakes agility into the product development cycle ensuring a smooth flow of product development. BA's also helps in making the product owners role more efficient and reliable. A BA analyzes product owner priorities and works to decompose them into small pieces. Each piece delivers value to the customer and is small enough to be accurately estimated.

Requirements Gathering in Agile

BA's initiate correct conversations to get the correct understanding of the requirements. One way an agile BA differs from traditional BA is that agile BA does not work on detailed requirement analysis document. Something that people coming from traditional waterfall method of development finds extremely odd.

The truth is we all live in an agile environment and requirements of the business keeps on changing with the changing environment, the waterfall model was static, clunky, slow and it often missed out on a lot of requirements. Still, the use case of waterfall mode should not be entirely ruled out, there are situations where waterfall model suites well than the agile model and sometimes even a hybrid approach turns out to be the best-desired model.

Documentation in Agile

Not having a detailed requirement analysis document does not means that there is no documentation but rather the documentation is of different kind. It serves as a communication ignitor or a record of a conversation, instead of having detailed diagrams the BA's usually takes the photographs of the whiteboard directly, record key points of the conversation or just write down key questions. Approach differs from BA to BA but one thing is common not a lot of time is spent on creating and managing a requirements document.

BA's Role Against Agile Manifesto

To further understand a BA's role in an agile team lets look at the agile manifesto and see how agile BA's mark against the fundamental points of agile manifesto.

Customer Satisfaction

Business Analysts facilitate the dialogue that helps the product owner prioritize what the team builds. Product backlog is constantly being monitored and evaluated. Tasks that do not confirm to the highest value for the customer are pushed back and taken out completely, high value tasks are pushed up and handed to the development team first.

Embracing Change

BA's facilitates the teams for thoughts and ideas that will make the product more valuable. External market changes, feedback from customers continuously influences the product and with the BA's help is incorporated into the product backlog and priorities. Changing requirements is good it means the product is getting better & better.

Frequent Delivery

BA's are key in helping customers and business leaders realize the intended benefits of the product sooner. BA's slice work in small increments of value and help the team analyze the business value, technical dependencies and technical debt.

Collaboration

BA's result in high impact collaboration and communication which results in rapid learning and fast decision making. When this is done well requirements and documentation are kept lightweight. The focus is on dialogue rather than cranky notes.

Motivated Teams

BA's serve the user, customer and the organization, they help them understand each piece of work and how it aligns with the vision. They help the product owner prioritize, make decisions, balance tradeoffs and move features and work that doesn't aligns with the vision.

Communication and Progress

Almost always all the meetings that are conducted are always face to face even with virtual teams if they are spread out geographically the team with the facilitation of a BA conducts the meeting in a virtual room where everyone is able to either see or hear everyone.

Technical Excellence

BA's job is to work with the technical team to understand risk, architecture and the technical debt. BA's help the technical team understand product and vision map. In turn technical team helps BA's & product owner(s) understand the technical aspects that help them prioritization of technical risks.

Continuous Improvement

BA's participate in teams retrospectives, frequent retrospectives derive continuous improvement and change the way the team works maximizing the value for the users and the organization. They constantly ask questions like What went well? what can be improved in the next iteration? And then improve and adjust accordingly.