Business Analysis

The role of Scrum Master is specific to Scrum. Since Scrum has become the most widely known of the agile approaches, the term Scrum Master has become a common term for the person who is acting as process guardian and facilitator for agile teams. Question: How do you feel about the BA being the daily …

Question: How do offshore resources fit into agile? Agile is heavily reliant on team communication and collaboration. The most effective means of communication is face to face, at a white board because you have the most means of transmitting information – the words, the nonverbals, and tone of voice. An ideal situation is for all …

Question: What is agile? There are as many different definitions of agile as there are practitioners. Not to be outdone, here is mine: Agile is collaboration among stakeholders to deliver value to customers in frequent increments with consistent reflection and adaptation. Question: In your experience, what are the core trends of agile? That is, what …

Question: What value does the BA provide within a true agile project? There’s actually two interesting points to discuss in this question. First, the question regarding the value provided by a business analyst, and the second, the label “true agile project”. I’ll address each point separately. The value provided by a business analyst on an …

Question: What has been the business side’s response to it [agile]? Generally the response has been initial skepticism and reluctance, followed by acceptance and finally enthusiasm in those cases where they are involved properly. The initial skepticism and reluctance spring from the increased frequency of their time commitment, and the smaller amount of documentation available …

Question: How do you overcome the expectation for a complete product when you are delivering piece by piece? The idea behind incremental delivery is that each individual piece delivered to the customer provides some value, although not all of the value that the overall product is expected to provide. If the product is a system …

Question: What, in your mind, is the one biggest benefit of agile? The biggest benefit of agile is the frequent delivery of valuable increments of the product. This is a great benefit or a couple of reasons: Customers and stakeholders are able to get a much better perspective on what the product is going to …

Question: Does agile typically require greater or fewer resources than a similar waterfall project? Software development projects use some interesting terminology. Aside from drug dealing it is the only domain that refers to its customers as “Users”… well I guess there is some software that is fairly addiction. The reference to team members as “resources” …

This post contains a series of questions all relating to helping people adopt agile. I’ll start by answering a general question that covers part of all these questions, and then address any specific instances separately. Question: How do you get people to convert from a waterfall to an agile approach? Understand why you want to …

Question: What are some good requirement tools to use with agile? Quality Center? Sticky notes, index cards flip charts, big pens, whiteboards, dry erase markers, your ears, and your brain. There’s a good chance that a project being run in an agile manner does not require an extremely intricate and complicated requirement tool. This statement …

Question: How do you go about getting the information you need to create your features? How do you do that today? The techniques you use to develop a clear understanding of the problem, establish characteristics of a good solution, and develop good solution options are not that different in an agile approach. What may be …

Question: What is the most challenging thing about implementing and using agile? The amount of self discipline needed to be successful with the approach. One big difference between plan driven and agile approaches is the amount of prescriptive guidance on which roles do what tasks at what time in the project. Many processes based on …