ROLE OF BUSINESS ANALYST IN SCRUM

Today, a lot of organizations are tending towards iterative and collaborative approach since it more cost effective and better way to develop certain products. Agile is one such project management approach where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams, which helps teams deliver value to their customers faster. Scrum is a subset of Agile. It is a lightweight process framework for agile development, and the most widely-used one. Scrum describes a set of meetings, tools, and roles that work in concert to help teams structure and manage their work. BA act like a bridge between business units and IT team, help them find the user requirements and provide solution.

Responsibilities of BA in SCRUM

As BA, foremost responsibility is to gather requirements, facilitate change, elicit requirements and document requirements regardless of methodology. Apart form these BA do have other responsibilities in SCRUM which are as follows,

• BA might be a scrum master, can lead a scrum meeting daily and piece in the whole project together.
• As BA is building the product, he makes sure all the problems are resolved. BA will be responsible for maximizing value of the product.
• Scrum BAs are heavily involved in Designing the solution and support Development and Testing.

• Scrum BAs take on a lot of the System Analysis responsibilities, and so take on an end-to-end perspective of and involvement in the project and its requirements.

To give an example, initially a project starts with a vision, in order to achieve the result, you have to deal with different people like users, buyers, developers, stakeholders and so on. From the requirement(features) BA identifies epic and breaks them as themes and then to user stories.  At high level stories are added to a backlog to the point of being development ready, developed which includes all the quality assurance aspects and finally deployed. User stories can come about in direct way like a very specific feature for very specific part of application, these types of stories are straight forward and as individual doing the analysis of this user story we are just ensuring the acceptance criteria meets the business needs and doesn’t break anything along the way.

In other circumstances, user stories come as broad and more general features like ordering products online. Before it is sprint ready refinement will probably break this story down into components needed to actually order something which can include the catalog we order from, shopping, payment methods and so on.  Which in turn may be broken into smaller components. If you work in larger organization then how catalog finds and organizes products will have dependencies from both product development and marketing teams. There will be bunch of rules and policies. This all before the sprint starts. Once the team determines the user stories have been well refined, work can actually begin. Once that happens decisions need to made on how the final implementation impacts particular stakeholders.

This is how Scrum BA adds value to the project.  Having the same Business Analyst for multiple teams can be an added advantage as they can interoperate various features and updates and analyze the credibility of the product. Hence, a Business Analyst is an integral part of any Scrum Team and a crucial member of the success of any project. There is lot or demand for BA role on agile projects today. So, let’s get our skills upgraded and be valuable!