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Business Analysts and Agile Development - Practical Guide PDF
Business Analysts and Agile Development - Practical Guide PDF
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Table of Contents
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Land, Ho!
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Recommended Resources
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 1
Agile is a set of
guidelines that helps
software development
teams deliver useful
increments of software
iteratively.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 2
User Story is
a short, simple
description of a feature,
written from the
perspective of a user.
Product Owner
(PO) works closely
with Development
team during sprint, and
acts as final authority
representing customer
interest.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 3
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 4
ort
line Rep
Title: Pipe
nt a
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quota.
Example:
Heres an example of Theme, Epic, and User Stories for a
hypothetical project - a CRM Software used by sales
teams.
Theme:
-- Manage Salespeople
Epic:
-- As a sales manager, I want reports so that I can
manage my salespeople.
User Stories:
-- As a sales manager, I want a weekly pipeline
report so that I can track the performance of my
salespeople against their quota.
-- As a sales manager, I want a weekly activity report
so that I can track the prospecting activities of my
salespeople.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 5
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A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 6
Project
Releases
Sprints
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 7
WRONG Question:
How can our BA
team follow Agile
process too?
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 8
RIGHT Question:
How can our BA
team work better with
our Agile development
teams?
he n!
t
s
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is i uesti
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A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 9
VP/Director,
BA
Manager, BA
Manager, PO
In my role at Accompa, Ive worked with BA teams at a number of mid-tolarge companies whose Development teams have transitioned to an Agile
process. Based on this, Id like to propose the following tips to BA teams.
Avast! Not all of these tips may work for your team - feel free to choose what
applies best, and adapt as needed.
1. Organization Structure:
A. I recommend that you keep your BA organization as is, and add a new
PO (Product Owner) team. See organization chart to the left.
B. PO team can be either within the BA organization or within the
Development organization. Pick the option that makes the best sense for
your company.
i. If in doubt, I recommend creating the PO team within your BA
organization.
2. Roles & Responsibilities:
A. BAs maintain a longer-term focus. They:
i. Create and manage themes and epics.
ii. Prioritize themes and epics working with business units.
iii. Create and manage project backlog for the project.
iv. Prioritize project backlog.
B. Before each release, BAs deliver release backlog to POs.
C. POs maintain a short-term focus. They:
i. Split release backlog delivered by BAs & organize them into sprints.
Break down stories to create smaller stories when needed.
ii. Dene acceptance criteria for each story.
iii. Prioritize stories within a sprint.
iv. Deliver sprint backlog to Development teams.
v. Attend daily sprint meetings with the SM & Development team, be
always available to answer questions from the sprint team, and act
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 10
24
hour
Daily sprint
meeting
1-4
weeks
Project Backlog
(BA)
Sprint
Backlog
(PO)
Sprint
(PO)
Working
Increment
of Software
Figure 3: How BA teams can successfully work with Agile Development teams
As you can see, BAs focus on longer-term project backlog (themes, epics, and
high-level stories), whereas POs focus on short-term sprint backlog.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 11
Note: This section is targeted at BA teams who are already using Accompa
cloud software. If your team is not yet using Accompa, you can just skim this
section to get a rough idea.
As Accompa cloud software is very exible, BA teams at more than 100
companies of all sizes - from Fortune 500s to growing startups - use it to manage
requirements for Agile projects, traditional waterfall projects, as well as hybrid
(hybrid of Agile and waterfall) projects.
Here are some best practices weve identied from discussions with BA teams
who use Accompa to manage requirements for Agile projects:
Gather requests from business units & stakeholder groups using SmartForms
& SmartEmails in Accompa.
Prioritize requests, working with business units, through the ROI Score and
Polls features in Accompa.
Create and manage themes using the Custom Object feature in
Accompa.
Use Accompa to create and manage epics. The Requirements object in
Accompa can be easily customized to do this.
If needed, create and manage high-level user stories using the Custom
Object feature in Accompa.
Use SmartViews feature in Accompa to group and manage data such as:
-- All epics for a theme.
-- All epics & user stories for a project. (Long-term project backlog)
-- All user stories for a theme.
Use Relationships feature in Accompa to track relationships between
themes, epics, and stories.
Prior to a release, clone the Project Backlog SmartView and apply
additional lter criteria in order to create the Release Backlog
SmartView. These additional criteria can be as simple as Release =
Release-5 or can be more complex depending on your needs.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 12
AGILE
Tool
Accompa
A
y B jects
b
e
o
sag gile pr
u
l
Too s in A
m
tea
Used
By
DEV
TOOL
PO
BA
SM
PO
Dev Team
Used
For
Longer-term Focus
Project Backlog
Sprint/Release Backlog
Detailed Requirements
Business Needs
Sprint Tasks
ROI Analysis
Burndown Analysis
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 14
1. Can we eliminate the Business Analyst (BA) role in our organization, and
convert the BAs to Product Owners (PO)?
This is generally a very bad idea. The reason is as follows:
As we discussed earlier in this guide, BAs add the most value to your
organization by having a longer-term focus. This helps them understand
business needs, elicit requirements from all stakeholder groups and
convert these into long-term project requirements.
On the other hand, POs are required to have a short-term focus to
ensure that the current sprint is successful.
One way to think about this is:
BAs add value by helping define the right things to build whereas POs add
value by helping build things right.
If you eliminate the BA role and convert your BAs to POs it is very likely that
your projects long-term health will suffer.
2. Can we ask our BAs to play the PO role too?
This is also generally a bad idea. As we discussed above, BAs need to have
longer-term focus to be successful, whereas POs need to have short-term
focus to be successful.
Asking the same person to be both BA and PO is like asking the same
person to be:
A patient long-term buy/hold investor (a la Warren Buffett)
- and simultaneously A frantic, hair-on-fire day trader
If your organization is very small (for example: 3 programmers & 1 BA) and
you simply cannot afford another headcount you may be able to get
away with the same person playing both roles. That said, people who can
play both roles effectively (and simultaneously) are extremely rare.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 15
It is best to think
of a user story
as a pointer to
a requirement
rather than as a
requirement itself.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 16
Many companies
find it beneficial
to create detailed
requirements for
stories in a sprint
backlog before that
sprint starts.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 17
The Product Owner (PO) prioritizes the work for each sprint.
However, the Development team often has leeway in terms of actual work
sequence, while taking into account the priority assigned by the PO.
9. Who answers the questions the Development team has about a user story, or
the detailed requirement it points to?
The Product Owner (PO) answers such questions. PO works with BAs, as
needed, to answer these questions.
10. What role does the Scrum Master play in writing user stories and
corresponding requirements?
Scrum Master (SM) focuses primarily on helping the Development team
follow the Scrum process. As such, SMs play little to no role in actually writing
the user stories and the requirements to which these stories point to.
Do you have other questions youd like to see addressed in this guide? Let
us know at agile-ebook@accompa.com. We will email you back with the
answers, and will add them to future editions of this guide.
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 18
BA
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 19
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 20
A Practical Guide: Business Analysts & Agile Development | Accompa, Inc | Table of Contents | pg. 21