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. 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.

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.

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.

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