Yesterday, Craig Brown asked Do we need Agile Business Analysts?. Two and a half years back when I joined ThoughtWorks, I would have said "No, we don't". Today I strongly disagree with the view that Business Analysts can be done away with on Agile projects.
The objective of an Agile project is to provide maximum value to the client as soon as possible.
Now I agree that the ideal situation would be when you have business users & developers who agree and abide by this sentiment. You can happily get rid of the BA in such a situation. Real life, for some reason, is never ideal.
Anyone who has interacted with business users on a medium to large project will have faced situations where it has been hard for the business users to come to a consensus on what they want. Business users are generally representatives of different functions of the organization. Each of them has expectations from the application which more often than not are conflicting. Keeping these users focused on what we set to achieve when we started building the software is what a BA does.
Being on an agile project gives the business users many chances to dream, many chances to make changes. Developers are human too. They dream about technology. While sometimes this can lead to some really cool/unique/usable feature in the product, it can also lead to "overcoolified unnecessities". Now in an ideal situation, all these dreams would come true. Unfortunately, dreams in the real world are bound by budgets & deadlines. Managing these dreams, ideas, changes so as to keep them aligned to the original business objective and deliver most value in the given time and budget is what a BA does.
What agile aims at, is to start minimal and change as required. When a small bug on a story turns out to be a big chunk of enhanced functionality, we create a new story. The tasks mentioned above, along with writing user stories, supporting implementation of the functionality, planning the iterations and releases, testing the developed functionality, etc. together makes for a considerable chunk of work. That's when you create a seperate role called Business Analysts.
Now this role can definitely be performed by developers. In my experience, though, good developers don't really want to do any of this. They want to write good code. That's what they are best at. That's where they will deliver maximum value.
Hence Business Analysts.
The objective of an Agile project is to provide maximum value to the client as soon as possible.
Now I agree that the ideal situation would be when you have business users & developers who agree and abide by this sentiment. You can happily get rid of the BA in such a situation. Real life, for some reason, is never ideal.
Anyone who has interacted with business users on a medium to large project will have faced situations where it has been hard for the business users to come to a consensus on what they want. Business users are generally representatives of different functions of the organization. Each of them has expectations from the application which more often than not are conflicting. Keeping these users focused on what we set to achieve when we started building the software is what a BA does.
Being on an agile project gives the business users many chances to dream, many chances to make changes. Developers are human too. They dream about technology. While sometimes this can lead to some really cool/unique/usable feature in the product, it can also lead to "overcoolified unnecessities". Now in an ideal situation, all these dreams would come true. Unfortunately, dreams in the real world are bound by budgets & deadlines. Managing these dreams, ideas, changes so as to keep them aligned to the original business objective and deliver most value in the given time and budget is what a BA does.
What agile aims at, is to start minimal and change as required. When a small bug on a story turns out to be a big chunk of enhanced functionality, we create a new story. The tasks mentioned above, along with writing user stories, supporting implementation of the functionality, planning the iterations and releases, testing the developed functionality, etc. together makes for a considerable chunk of work. That's when you create a seperate role called Business Analysts.
Now this role can definitely be performed by developers. In my experience, though, good developers don't really want to do any of this. They want to write good code. That's what they are best at. That's where they will deliver maximum value.
Hence Business Analysts.
