Does a BA role fits into Agile/Scrum?

Agile primary focus is on collaboration and teamwork which makes many roles unnecessary and the lack of specific roles gives business analysts an amazing opportunity to expand their contour in both technical aspect/perspective as well as business aspect/perspective.

Agile prescribes no documentation or requirements artifacts but  the documentation is produced in either of two ways discussed below.

• Business analyst in collaboration with team members decides how to deliver the solution in the best way and also decides the extinct to which the necessary documentation is required.
• In contrast to above point, Business analysts are required in completion of extensive requirements documents if the large organisations uses brief methods and standards for detailed planned projects.

Agile uses short delivery cycles knows as sprints or iterations which makes the iteration scope smaller  in comparison with the scope of non-agile or traditional projects and as a result, Business analysts needs to maintain his focus only on the part of the solution which will be delivered during that specific iteration. Business analyst in collaboration with team members determines the analysis needed at the beginning of the project to make the big picture and also during every iteration to understand it’s scope.

Business Analyst during the iteration facilitates collaboration between the stakeholders and the team members and also collaboration with in the team members which is crucial for the success of the project. They help team members in indentifying the stakeholders to talk to, translates the business language to technical language or vice versa making all the team members and stake holders talk in the same language.

Agile has product owner who is the decision maker and the one who represents the business needs of the project which provides business analyst with an opportunity to work and assist the product owner in business domain analysis, product backlog stocking, product backlog grooming. Also, in some cases, product owner may come from the technical background and may need the help of business analyst to write the acceptance, wire frames, stories.

In a nutshell, the business analysts role in scrum also plays very important for project success. Right from the time to understand the customer needs to sprint demo.

Few of the important skills that business analyst must have for working on agile projects are as follows.

• Business analyst must understand the business area of the project he is working on
• Business analyst should be able to create big picture and should be able to come up possible solutions.
• Business analyst must understand the agile development process.
• Business analyst should be familiar with the requirements techniques like use cases, use stories and informal modelling which are the primary requirements techniques which will be used in agile projects.