We have talked about the Agile perspectives, its approaches and techniques but you may be wondering how they are linked to the business analysis tasks and practices as defined by the BABOK® Guide.
The agile business analyst uses the tasks and practices that have been defined by the BABOK, but they may be modified to fit in with the agile discipline.
Each knowledge area has techniques which are pertinent to the agile perspective.
1. Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: detailed business analysis planning and monitoring tasks can be postponed until the work on an activity is ready to start.
A draft of the business analysis plan can be created at the beginning of the project and updated as changes occur and the initiative progresses.
Stakeholder collaboration is vital to the success of agile projects so the business analyst should plan to involve, engage, and collaborate with the stakeholders.
While communication is usually less formal and less importance is placed on written documents in Agile initiative.
2 Elicitation and Collaboration: Elicitation activities such as workshops can be initially used to understand the high-level vision and scope of the solution and ass more backlog items are developed, the information can be updated.
The purpose of the elicitation activities is to produce just enough detail to ensure that work is performed correctly while working towards the goals.
The Agile approaches goal is to minimize the time between the elaboration of needs and their implementation in the solution.
3 Requirements Life Cycle Management : As the agile initiatives progress, the scope is increasingly defined. The work items prioritization is based on value and development priority.
The stakeholders would validate the developing solution at the end of every iteration instead of using a formal requirements approval process.
4 Strategy Analysis: Strategy analysis is used in the agile initiative to ensure that the solution delivered continues to provide value to stakeholders.
The proposed solution is assessed against the current business in every iteration t to ensure that it will fulfill the business needs.
The Agile team members uses strategy analysis to understand and define the product vision, and evaluate the associated risks.
5 Requirements Analysis and Design Definition : The stakeholders needs are gradually clarified during an agile project and the analysis and design activities are performed just-in-time, either before or during the iteration in which the solution element will be developed.
Analysis performed just before the iteration is used to provide the team with enough information to evaluate the planned work or during the iteration is to provide the team with enough information to deliver the planned work.
Models and other analysis and design techniques may be used but they are discarded after they have served their purposes.
The analysis and design approach used should support progressive clarification, be flexible to change, and not influence the solution selection process.
The user stories created for the work items should be small enough so that they can be easily understood by the agile team members, achievable and testable.
6 Solution Evaluation: The stakeholders and agile team would continuously evaluate the development solution as it is gradually built and refined.
Evaluation of the developing solution happens at the end of every development cycle to ensure that the deliverable meets the stakeholders needs and expectations.