The Importance of a Business Analyst on an Effective Software Development Team
The Business Analyst (BA) role is a crucial component of an effective agile software development team. BAs have many responsibilities ranging from managing requirements between stakeholders and the development team to gathering, analyzing and documenting user stories.
BAs can sometimes be confused with the Product Owner (PO), which has a similar role. And although they do work closely together when establishing the requirements of a product, they are essentially different. BAs focus on translating product requirements into actionable user stories for the development team, while POs are more concerned with the overall product roadmap and the priority of features based on market and internal feedback. (You can read more about a POs role in a software development team in our blog post, ‘The Product Owner Role is the Key to Software Development Success’). The BA also helps coordinate the development team and often plays the role of Scrum Master on small teams.
An effective Business Analyst creates alignment between different members of the product development team, resolving conflicts between the vision a product owner has and technical, budget, or time constraints imposed by the state of the project at that time. This process creates a feeling of ownership across the whole team and allows all team members to have a voice in the product development process.
The result of good Business Analysis is a distillation of the Product Owner's vision into clear and concise requirements that have been vetted with all relevant stakeholders, which are then handed off to the development team to generate software.
The BA’s Involvement in a Product’s Lifecycle
Business Analysts are involved in all stages of a product’s development process, from inception to maintenance.
The first stage usually involves direct communication with customers and stakeholders (internal and/or external). BAs work closely with customer POs and User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI) designers to assess business, market and customer needs and to determine whether envisioned product features are feasible. All requirements and ideas are typically documented in a user story backlog from which the high-priority items are selected for additional detailed analysis in preparation for software development.
High-priority user stories are selected from the backlog for detailed story analysis, which includes a detailed description of a feature from the end-user’s point of view as well as applicable UI wireframes and user acceptance criteria.
Next, the development team estimates the scope of the development effort of each story, usually in complexity points, which facilitates determining how many stories can fit into a development sprint, given current development resources and team velocity (how many story points can be completed in a given period of time).
The BA works with the development team to assemble a set of stories (which may have functional and/or technical interdependence) into a sprint or release.
Once a sprint or release has been planned with the above-described steps, the BA helps bridge the gap between technical and business team members. During execution and coding, BAs should be available to facilitate communication between all team members about the user stories and to rapidly get questions answered that may be blocking software development.
Once development and testing have been completed for a sprint or a release, the BA facilitates user acceptance testing and helps to coordinate the release of the new functionality into production.
Relevant post-maintenance comes into play after a successful production release. Reports, summarizing the release notes and team velocity, are created as an end result to ensure that all customer requirements are met, document what has been done, and to examine the success of the development process.
Some day-to-day tasks of a Business Analyst include:
Eliciting business requirements from stakeholders
Breaking down product requirements into user stories and epics (which are collections of stories that are interdependent relative to a more holistic product feature)
Serving as a bridge between the product owner and the development team
Getting questions answered and gathering more detailed information for the development team during the development process
Reporting development progress to stakeholders
Participating in agile scrum meetings
Generating release notes
Planning and prioritizing future work
Identifying and defining opportunities for process improvement
Keeping track of team mood and motivation.
Business Analysts play a crucial role in the development process. They need to be well-versed in recognizing customer needs, as well as time management and communication skills. They essentially are the problem solvers of the project that ensure solutions meet the customer's needs.
At SRG, we have deeply experienced Business Analysts that are always a key part of our development teams and have contributed greatly to many diverse and successful software development projects.
