Milena Mastrasso

I work as business analysis. I have learn traditional business analysis (like Unified Process, Cascade, between others), but I found some problems with this and other prescriptive methodologies. One of this problems, in my opinion the most important, is that this type of methodologies consider that the clients always know what they want, and could explain it in the right way.  In addition all the prescriptive methodologies consider that documenting before development is important, and this documentation won’t change. My experience said that it is unfortunately false.

Some time ago I used to be a .Net developer when I start reading about agile software development. I found it really interesting because it focuses on the working software, it allow teams to develop high quality software and produce retrospective in the short-term. I consider this important things to do a successful project.

So I start thinking about the business analyst role in agile methodologies, because one of the agile manifesto rules said:

Working software over comprehensive documentation

If business analysts don’t spend several hours of their working time documenting, modeling and writing about lot of requirements. What are their responsibilities?

The business analyst must collaborate with the team.

As I mention in one of my last posts about people factor at agile software development, collaboration between all the team members is essential. Business analyst is the expert on understanding client requirements, he knows what the client is expecting about the system behavior. He will spent more time collaborating with whole team working on how the system will behave instead documenting.

Some projects need to write requirements because organization formality requires it.

How does the business analyst document this without investing too much time on it?

Requirements and specifications are written as user stories. A user story is a description of a requirement, but it is not a full specification.

Besides user stories describe a functionality, this are also useful to prioritize requirements and estimate costs.

Each user story could be code in an iteration or increment, so the specification must be smaller enough to could develop it in a small period of time, but it must be detail enough to estimate the work. Every user story must have acceptance tests attached, allowing the developer to test when the user story is done and also allowing the customer to verify it.

In addition, user stories must avoid dependencies of other stories, but you can combine some of them to deliver in the same iteration.

Which skills are needed to be an agile business analyst?

I mention before that business analyst have to document requirements in a different way, less detailed. So he must learn a new way of writing and documenting.

He also have to improve his communication and collaboration skills because he has the responsibility of translate business requirements to the technical  members team. He is not the unique responsible of making specification, he must work in group and involve other team members in this activity.

If the business analyst have good concepts of software architecture will help to reduce the gap to the development team and the business. He can understand and explain better how the system will be implementing.

Is the business analyst needed in any agile software development?

Some projects don’t need a business analyst,  sometimes a product owner (view my post of Scrum) is enough. When the project has a grater need of defining requirements and writing specifications is business analyst is added in the agile team. However, including a business analyst can perform the team comprehension requirements.

Conclusion 

Software development processes are changing, any time much more business adopt agile methodologies. The biggest business (like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are using Scrum, other business are adopting this or other agile methodologies. They consider that adopting a methodology that give flexibility and quick response to changes is very important.

I think that a good business analyst must work on acquire and improve some skills to be competitive in the actual market. If a business analyst wants to work in a agile software development is completely possible.

He has to learn a bit about agile methodologies and is necessary that he wants to works in groups with cross-functionality. It is a way of sharing experiences and knowledge, this makes it possible to learn from each other.

Come on, it’s not so difficult!