Are Business Analysts needed in Agile?
Many think that the role of Business Analyst is not needed in Agile as they say that agile teams work on user stories and don’t need requirements. But, this is not the truth. Let’s find out why are Business Analysts needed in Agile.
Agile teams work on user stories but, from where those requirements come from? and how do they know what the software is supposed to do and what to build in the software? All this information comes from a business analyst. Every project to become successful needs Business Analysts to discover what business needs are and to determine those changes that will have the most value to the business as agile is a way of developing and delivering a valuable software in a fast and agile environment and the team should be able to deliver it with maximum efficiency using agile methodology.
Agile needs Business Analysts to collaborate with business users in the organization, to gain the alignment on what is needed and make sure that the items in product backlog and user stories add real value to the business
They need Business Analysts to view the product backlog and find all the interrelated requirements and dependencies to make sure that the delivered pieces of software are adding value to the business process. They need us to analyze and discover what the business processes are and help those business users in implementing changes to add advantage to that software. They need us to organize the backlogs, groom it, prioritize it, remove and add things that are needed to, filter things and add estimates so that the team can easily find what needs to be done in the following sprints.
So, we should not be in the perception that agile doesn’t need Business Analysts as they with agile add tremendous value to an organization and need to see how we all can work together to achieve a great value to an organization making things much easier.