The Good Shepherd - the Role of BAs in Agile

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Eerrk!
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The Good Shepherd
What role does the BA play on Agile projects?

What does the BA do?
• Grab a card and a pen.
• Write your name and company or position.
• Think of 2 things a BA does? Leave space for more.
• Talk to others - share your card, introduce yourselves and discuss what you think
a BA does.
• Add new ideas onto your card until you have 10 ideas.

6 Knowledge Areas
• Business Analysis Planning & Monitoring
• Elicitation
• Requirements Management & Communication
• Enterprise Analysis
• Requirements Analysis
• Solution Assessment & Validation
Business Analysis is the practice of
enabling change in an organizational
context, by defining needs and
recommending solutions that deliver
value to stakeholders.

Cost of
Change
Detail of
Requirements
Evolving
Requirements
Hypothesized
Requirements
Emerging needs
as development
progresses
Capture all
possible needs

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Berlin Brandenburg Airport,
originally planned for 2010
As of March 2013, it is not
known when the airport will be
inaugurated

agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2009.
Agile Manifesto
We are uncovering better ways of developing software
by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work
we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

A business analyst (BA) is a
poor substitute for developers
who have both ready access to
actual stakeholders and agile
modeling skills.
Remember, BA is also the
abbreviation for band-aid.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/theknowlesgallery/4613440902/

Eerrk!
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/61021753@N02/6288298609/

psst!
Let me tell you a secret

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/minnesota_social_marketing/4436257448/
The “Product Owner”
...isn’t

Three Scrum Roles Product
Owner
Scrum
Master
Development
Team

Product Owner Responsibility
The Product Owner main responsibility is
to maximize the Return On Investment
of her Product

What does a Product Owner do?
• With the stakeholders, the PO
• Deﬁnes the Product Vision
• Elicits Requirements
• Attributes Business Value to Requirements
• Plans the release of the product
• With the development team, the PO
• Breaks down Requirements into Feature Sets and User Stories
• Creates and grooms the Product Backlog
• Collaborates on the product

Authority
Knowledge
Availability
PO
Product Owner
Characteristics

Just a wafer thin mint?

PO Team
Single Chief Product/
Portfolio Owner
• Focus on delighting the customer
through rapid value delivery
• Strategic vision holder mediates
prioritization questions
• Provides vision and direction with
input from stakeholders

PO Team
Portfolio Owner
Multiple Tactical
Product Owners
• Tactical product ownership shifts
depending on current focus
• Prioritizes features/projects across
the portfolio as a team

PO Team
Portfolio Owner
Multiple Tactical
Product Owners
Multiple System
Product Owners
• Own strategic direction of their system
• Often shared role with tactical PO

Vision
Planning
Roadmap
Planning
Release
Planning
Release
PlanningSprint
Planning
Daily

Planning
Five Levels of Planning
Annually
Exec Management,
Stakeholders
Bi-‐annually
Product Owners, UX,
Engineering, Architecture
Quarterly
Product Owners, UX,
Architecture, Analytics, SEO,
Production
Bi-‐weekly
Product Owners, Delivery
Team
Daily
Product Owners, Delivery
Team
Vision
Planning
Roadmap
Planning

Vision/Roadmap Planning
Externally-facing
Portfolio Planning (annual) - create a map
of all active and planned projects for the
foreseeable future
• Strategic prioritization
decisions
• Core functionality to meet
business need
•
c
Stakeholders

Release Planning
Externally-facing
foreseeable future
Release Planning (quarterly) - create a map
foreseeable future
decisions
business need
• Prioritization and release/
product roadmap deﬁnition
...
Stakeholders

Sprint Planning
Internally-facing
Externally-facing
foreseeable future
Release Planning (quarterly) - create a map
foreseeable future
decisions
business need
• Prioritization and release/
product roadmap deﬁnition
Authority
Knowledge
Availability
PO
• Prioritization within sprints
• Focus on delivering against
planned release goals
• Story writing and acceptance of
stories at Sprint Review
• Regular interaction with
development team
Sprint Planning/Review
(bi-weekly) - planning of
stories for upcoming sprint
and acceptance of stories
completed in previous sprint
...
Backlog Reﬁnement (weekly)
- collaboratively prepare stories
with enough detail to be pulled
into a sprint by the team
StakeholdersPOs

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/roycostello/44
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/roycostello/4458744326/

Cost of
Change
Detail of
Requirements
Validated
Requirements
Evolving
Requirements
Hypothesized
Requirements
Lean Startup
experiments
Emerging needs
as development
progresses
Capture all
possible needs

• In software development high
cost of change leads to inclusive
thinking
• Any and every idea has to be
captured in the ﬁrst version of a
requirements speciﬁcation
• Creates waste - bloated
documents, unwanted features
and entitlement thinking
Chasing the 80%

Shifting Paradigms
“I know that half of
my advertising
budget is wasted,
but I’m not sure
which half”
Lord Leverhulme
B.G.|A.G.
http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2009/3161/more-smbs-use-online-media-than-traditional
http://marketing.blogs.ie.edu/archives/2011/01/trends-in-online-advertising-in-2011-in-the-united-states.php

Validated Learning
• Understand the problem a
feature will solve
• Decide how to ask if your
customer cares
• Validate before investing
complete cost

Theory
Prediction
Experiment
Observe
Use the theory
to make a
prediction
Design an
experiment to
test the
predictionRun the
experiment
Modify or change
your theory
The Scientiﬁc Method

The Theory of General Relativity
Einstein’s Theory of
General Relativity
Light bends in a
gravitational ﬁeld
Solar Eclipse of 1919
Observations validated
General Relativity
Einstein’s
prediction
(1907)
Wait for 1919 solar
eclipse to observe
whether or not light
bends around the sun
Arthur Eddington
observed that Light did
bend around the sun
Gradual acceptance of
General Relativity over
Newtonian Mechanics
http://thethoughtstash.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/how-eddington-demonstrated-that-einstein-was-right/

Vanity vs. Actionable Metrics
Vanity metrics (like web hits or number of
downloads) which only serve to
document the current state of the
product but offer no insight into how we
got here or what to do next.
An actionable metric is one that ties
speciﬁc and repeatable actions to
observed results.

Minimum Viable Product
A Minimum Viable Product may be an entire product or a sub-set of product (such
as a feature):
• Product - The canonical MVP strategy for a web application is to create a mock
website for the product and purchase online advertising to direct trafﬁc to the
site. The mock website may consist of a marketing landing page with a link for
more information or purchase. The link is not connected to a purchasing system,
instead clicks are recorded and measure customer interest.
• Feature - A link to a new feature in a web application might be shown in a
prominent location on the website. The feature is not implemented, rather an
apology, mock-up, or marketing page is provided. Clicks of the link are recorded
and provide an indication as to the demand for the feature in the customer base.
It is ALWAYS smaller than you think!

• In 2009, Google ran
approximately 12,000
experiments, of which about
10% led to business changes
• To avoid wasting even more
effort testing, each test must
take less than 10% of the
average effort needed to deliver
a business change (feature)
How Much Effort on Validation
Feature usage in
enterprise software
45%
19%
16%
13%
7%
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Often
Always
Standish Group - CHAOS Report, 2002

Feedback loops make
a big difference
In November 2007,
economists in the Survey of
Professional Forecasters —
examining some 45,000
economic-data series —
foresaw less than a 1-in-500
chance of an economic
meltdown as severe as the
one that would begin one
month later.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/
magazine/the-weatherman-is-not-a-
moron.html
In 1940, the chance of an
American being killed by
lightning was about 1 in
400,000.
Today it’s 1 in 11 million.

Product Ownership is a team sport
Strategic product
stewardship
Tactical product
ownership
Operational product
craftsmanship
• understand what return or value means
• make business model visible
• continually validate your assumptions
• capture investment/costs and maximize ROI
• prioritize with all stakeholders/owners

State of Scrum 2013
• 22% have no Product Owner
role
• 24% of our participants
have a Product Owner role
that is in alignment with
Scrum best practices
• 38% have a Product Owner
who juggles priorities
for multiple stakeholders
Scrum Alliance / 2013 State of Scrum Report
2013-State-of-Scrum-Report_062713_ﬁnal.pdf

thank you
dave.sharrock@agile42.com
follow us on: @agile42
follow me on: @davesharrock
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
This presentation is covered under Creative Commons

“The Good Shepherd – What role does the BA play on Agile Projects”
Agile teams may be popping up everywhere, with ScrumMasters and Product
Owners and Development Teams. But what role does the BA play? Should the BA
join the team, working with the development team to deliver work requests? Or
should the BA take on the role of Product Owner, working with the business to
define the work requests and ranking them to maximize value delivery? Is the BA
best suited to the ScrumMaster, guiding the team to predictable delivery? Or is
there some other role we've not talked about? The answer, of course, is 'it
depends'. We will discuss the different roles on an agile team, and investigate how
the traditional responsibilities of a BA role fit within the agile context. What we want
to understand is how the BA fits into the agile development process, considering
how the agile team works, and how the responsibilities of the BA are addressed in
an agile environment.

The Good Shepherd - the Role of BAs in Agile

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