The business analysts role in an Agile project

[Peter Onneby]

Hi Amr!

I work with a small team of developers and lately I have been trying to promote agile practices to our project.
As Agile development methods means little up front requirements gathering the developer becomes more involved with gathering requirements throughout the lifecycle of the project. When the developers do most of the requirements gathering what is the business analysts role in an Agile project?

Thanks
Peter
[ September 09, 2008: Message edited by: Peter Onneby ]

[Ilja Preuss]

Hi Peter,

Ron Jeffries has a nice article on that topic: http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/BizAnalysis.htm

[Amr Elssamadisy]

Hi Peter,

I have seen two models work very well:

1) The customer is unavailable to the team and the business analyst works as a proxy to the customer. The business analyst usually has specialized domain knowledge - but not always - sometimes it just takes significant research and occasional contact with the real customer.

2) There is a valid customer that is part of the team. At that point there is no need for the middle man. The customer does the role of the traditional business analyst along with the developer(s). In this model there is no business analyst.

Both work well. With organizations in transition with (2) in place, frequently business analysts work with the onsite customer as part of a customer team.

Hope this helps.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Amr Elssamadisy:

I have seen two models work very well:

1) The customer is unavailable to the team and the business analyst works as a proxy to the customer. The business analyst usually has specialized domain knowledge - but not always - sometimes it just takes significant research and occasional contact with the real customer.

2) There is a valid customer that is part of the team. At that point there is no need for the middle man. The customer does the role of the traditional business analyst along with the developer(s). In this model there is no business analyst.

I've also heard about a third model:

3) There is a valid customer that is part of the team, but he isn't used to do the work of a business analyst. A knowledgeable business analysts assists him coming up with good requirements, test cases etc. pp.