What are agile business analysts (ABA)? To head down that path, it helps to put the context in place of what a traditional business analyst (BA) is.
Historically, BA’s have been used in waterfall software development practices to assist with requirements documents that sometimes take months to complete and exceed hundreds of pages. These development practices have been criticized for lengthy development stages and requirements that often change by the time the software is deployed. Agile is just one answer to these problems by shortening deployment cycles so that customers can get changes more frequently and more important feature sets can be prioritized above the less important requirements. Requirements documents are replaced by user stories that simply state out testing conformance so typically achieves the feature request in just a few paragraphs.
So where would a BA fit in this methodology that prides itself on producing only the necessary documentation to achieve quality results? ABA's come into the agile process as a way to extend the work being done by product owners. They still are instrumental in getting good requirements and their most important goal in agile terms is to get epic user stories into stories that are sprint-able prior to involving the scrum team. The benefit of using these resources in your agile scrum is to increase scrum team velocity and increase customer satisfaction for the product being developed.
Over the next several entries, I will describe in detail how this can be accomplished along with some of the lessons learned from our business along the journey.
Historically, BA’s have been used in waterfall software development practices to assist with requirements documents that sometimes take months to complete and exceed hundreds of pages. These development practices have been criticized for lengthy development stages and requirements that often change by the time the software is deployed. Agile is just one answer to these problems by shortening deployment cycles so that customers can get changes more frequently and more important feature sets can be prioritized above the less important requirements. Requirements documents are replaced by user stories that simply state out testing conformance so typically achieves the feature request in just a few paragraphs.
So where would a BA fit in this methodology that prides itself on producing only the necessary documentation to achieve quality results? ABA's come into the agile process as a way to extend the work being done by product owners. They still are instrumental in getting good requirements and their most important goal in agile terms is to get epic user stories into stories that are sprint-able prior to involving the scrum team. The benefit of using these resources in your agile scrum is to increase scrum team velocity and increase customer satisfaction for the product being developed.
Over the next several entries, I will describe in detail how this can be accomplished along with some of the lessons learned from our business along the journey.
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