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Agile Business Analysts

Yesterday, Craig Brown asked Do we need Agile Business Analysts?. Two and a half years back when I joined ThoughtWorks, I would have said “No, we don’t”. Today I strongly disagree with the view that Business Analysts can be done away with on Agile projects. The objective of an Agile project is to provide maximum value to the client as soon as possible. Now I agree that the ideal situation would be when you have business users & developers who agree and abide by this sentiment. You can happily get rid of the BA in such a situation. Real life,… Read More »Agile Business Analysts

StubbornSoft & MammothSoft

I met a couple of villains today a formidable lot. StubbornSoft was one of them called, the other was MammothSoft StubbornSoft had it’s own ways for the user it didn’t care. MammothSoft would smugly say “Try, change me if you dare.” In a moment I then realized my dark and ugly fate. When both of them cried out to me Why, come let’s integrate We’ll make a heavenly trio they said our technologies cutting-edge So smart piece of code as us there’d ne’er be, we pledge “I am quite small” to them said I, “my features are too few. But… Read More »StubbornSoft & MammothSoft

Mountains to climb

Business Analysts work closely with the customer. Each new area is a challenge. There are discussions and problems and solutions. Both the analyst and the customer get comfortable with the idea of finding better, simpler solutions. This is especially true for fixed bid projects, as the project is at stake if the analyst fails to find a simpler solution and convince the customer too. Solving problems is always exciting. For an analyst, this is the juicy part of the job, because no human being can survive for long just writing word documents one after the other. One incentive is customer… Read More »Mountains to climb

How to eat an elephant?

The only way to do that is to cut the elephant into slices. Slices which are small enough to be eaten because the sole purpose of cutting the elephant is to make it possible for humans to eat it. You’ll need a certain number of people to eat a whole elephant anyway. If you make slices small enough, at least they won’t feel sick at the end of it. There is no overhead in the activities of choosing the piece that looks most delicious, putting it in your mouth, chewing it and swallowing it. There is some, but it definitly… Read More »How to eat an elephant?

Applied Integration

For a while, I have had a question on my mind that I couldn’t really find an answer to. I had almost forgotten about it but a friend brought up the same question and before I knew it I was giving him my take on it. Before I get to the question though, I want to write a little about integration. Last release I was involved in building some functionality to integrate with one of our client’s systems. As I understand it, there are four prominent characteristics of integration that should be kept in mind when we decide to integrate… Read More »Applied Integration

Embracing Bunker Busters

For various reasons, there are situations when there is no running away from a Bunker Buster. An agile team should therefore be watchful. Once the analyst finds a potential bunker buster, he/she will have only one parameter to tweak… The timing. Embracing a bunker buster is a a brave step, I would say. But then isn’t, bravery only relative to the preparation?? SymptomsHere are some tips out of my experience for identifying bunker busters. Note that these symptoms do not decide a bunker buster individually. Like gesture-clusters in body language, they work in combinations. VaguenessThe first and most probable characteristic… Read More »Embracing Bunker Busters

Avoiding Bunker Busters

“Prevention is better than cure” and one good way of handling Bunker Busters is to avoid them. Agile teams seem to be wary of handling anything by prevention, as it requires thinking ahead and taking care of things to come rather than things that are. While this makes perfect sense for Grenades and Shells, Bunker Busters have much more potential for damage and it is worthwhile trying to prevent them rather than handling them when they come. There are areas in every application which can prove to be huge bunker busters if not handled in advance. Teams are even aware… Read More »Avoiding Bunker Busters

Grenades, Shells & Bunker Busters

As agile business analysts, we try to keep our stories small, independent, testable and valueable. Once in a while, though, we come face to face with a Bunker Buster and everything starts looking scary. Impact Every story is likely to impact a certain portion of the developed application. Measuring this impact and using it to “time” a story well, is something commonly ignored by business analysts. This doesn’t mean that the analyst or the team doesn’t know the impact of a story but this measure is not used in planning exercises effectively. We can almost categorize stories to get a… Read More »Grenades, Shells & Bunker Busters

Deceptively small stories??

For sometime now I have got the feedback from developers, that the stories I write look small but have loads of work to be actually done and they get under estimated during the Iteration Planning Meeting. Now when I asked for a way in which I could make the story look as big as it is, I was given the idea of putting tasks in the story. I have used this method for sometime now and I find myself writing things like: TASK 1: When the user clicks “OK” an empty Word template should be uploaded to the server and… Read More »Deceptively small stories??

Communication Patterns

Incidentally my earlier post was about how Distributed Agile works. My unexpectedly long web silence was infact due to the current DA project that I am working on. One interesting thing that we get to observe is how the communication patterns change over time, amongst the local team and also with the distributed team. There are few specific things that I have observed during the last 5 months on this project, which I would like to bring up here. All of these relate to the communication that happens across oceans. OverviewLast few months I have been busy on a Distributed… Read More »Communication Patterns