In the busy business world, being quick and adaptable is super important. That’s where Agile Business Analysts come in. They understand customers and work together with developers. Through open communication and frequent feedback, Agile Business Analysts ensure projects stay on track to meet changing needs. With a flexible approach, they help create solutions people love. In this blog, we’ll explore the key roles and responsibilities of an Agile Business Analyst and how they help teams work flexibly to deliver value.
Table of Contents:
Who is an Agile Business Analyst?
A Business Analyst who works in an Agile team using the Agile methodology with the Product Owner and other team members is an Agile Business Analyst. An Agile BA is a Business Analyst who works on projects using Agile methodologies.
Agile methodologies are based on adaptive planning, swiftness to change, empowering people, early delivery, and continuous improvement.
Have a look at our YouTube video to learn more about Agile Methodology:
Role of Business Analyst in Agile
A Business Analyst plays an essential role in an agile project. Now, let’s understand what’s the role of a Business Analyst in the agile team.
A Product Owner, a Product Manager, an Agile Business Analyst, a User Experience Consultant, Developers, and a Quality Analyst are present in an Agile team.
When a stakeholder approaches the team with a business problem, inception is done. This process includes brainstorming, user journey definitions, and finding out solutions. They list out the features of the problem. Then these are converted into logical deliverable stories.
Following this, User stories are written. User stories are nothing but a simple and informal way of writing the features from the customer’s perspective. And now comes the role of an Agile Business Analyst. An Agile BA has to review these stories and prepare a schedule for upcoming processes.
After this, the analyst converts the data collected from brainstorming and assembles it to obtain journeys. Then these journeys are broken down into small parts such that each of the sections provides software information. It is called story slicing.
All the above-mentioned tasks are done by the Business Analyst in the team. Followed by this, the analyst is supposed to prioritize the user stories according to the customer preferences and develop them to give products.
The Business Analyst role in Agile methodology is way more advanced than the traditional Business Analyst. From the above points, it is clear that the Business Analyst’s role in Agile is advanced as compared to a traditional BA since they work on various in-depth aspects such as product backlog, user story, and acceptance criteria.
How to become an Agile BA from a Traditional BA?
If you’re a traditional Business Analyst and want to become a specialist in Agile, follow these steps.
- Study about the Agile methodology and related aspects
- Start working on building user stories. Understand story points and the importance of writing them
- Build your negotiation skills. Improve your communication skills and be flexible. A Business Analyst having an agile mindset is the first step towards becoming an Agile Business Analyst.
- Also, get certified in CSPO to take the future Agile projects to master the above skills.
Qualifications of an Agile Business Analyst
To become successful in this domain, one must have the following qualifications:
- Post-graduation in computing and/or business discipline
- Extensive relevant experience
- Certified in one or more Agile methodologies and Business Analyst courses
- Extensive experience in using SAFe/ Agile
Roles and Responsibilities of an Agile BA
A job description of an Agile Business Analyst will comprise of the following roles and responsibilities.
- Provide high-quality analytical solutions for the key stakeholders
- To increase the business value, collaborate with the product owner to create the product backlog by using Agile practices
- Develop business cases by working closely with product managers to develop business cases.
- Provide user stories to multi-disciplinary teams and define the business-driven acceptance criteria
- Support Agile practices and encourage the improvement of service
- Facilitate various Agile processes such as Iteration / Release Planning, Backlog Refinement, Retrospective, Sprint Review, Daily Stand-up
- Create low or high-fidelity prototypes accordingly.
- Provide subject matter proficiency in specific functional area(s) to the assigned Scrum team
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Skills Required to Become an Agile BA
An Agile Business Analyst needs to be business-oriented, eager to learn, empathetic, and flexible towards working in an Agile environment and should be innovative and goal-oriented. These attributes are a must needed to be successful. An Agile Business Analyst resume must comprise the following characteristics:
- Understanding of technical business area related to the projects taken
- Expert in conceptual modeling; visualize possible solutions innovatively
- Excellent proficiency in verbal and non-verbal communication skills
- Multitasking ability
- Ability to critically question to help the team foresee the future problems
- Ability to file the requirements based on the project
- Ability to understand the Agile development process
- Familiarity with requirement techniques such as informal modeling, use cases, user stories. These are the primary techniques used by Agile teams for requirements gathering.
Frequently Asked Interview Questions
We’ve listed a few key interview questions asked in an interview for the position of Agile Business Analyst.
1. How do you assess the qualities of a requirement?
Answer: The features of customer requirements are analyzed by the SMART or DEEP rule.
- Specific: The requirement has to be precise enough to be filed.
- Measurable: Measure the success criteria of the requirement based on different parameters.
- Attainable: The requirement has to be feasible enough within the scope of the resources given
- Relevant: The requirement should match the project’s business case.
- Timely: Communicate requirements on time
- Detailed Enough—Acceptance criteria should be detailed enough
- Emergent—The Product Backlog should be refined over time
- Estimated Relatively—The requirements have to be estimated relatively
- Prioritized Order—Order has to be prioritized by dependencies, value, cost, risk, etc.
2. How is a product developed from a basic idea?
Answer: A product is developed from an idea using any of the following steps:
- Market Analysis: It is a business plan used to study the characteristics of a market such as the dynamical behavior of the market and the changes in a market.
- SWOT Analysis: Abbreviation for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a company
- Competitor Analysis: This process analyses the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
- Strategic Vision and Feature set: Development of the goals and plan to achieve progress by working towards the vision.
- Prioritize Features: The product features developed by the product management team have to be prioritized.
3. What are the various types of business analysis diagrams you know?
Answer: Here listed are a few diagrams that can be used for business analysis:
- Activity Diagram
- Data Flow Diagram
- Use case Diagram
- Class Diagram
- Entity Relationship Diagram
- Sequence Diagram
- Collaboration Diagram
4. Name a few essential Agile metrics to be considered by Business Analysts.
Answer: The following are a few essential Agile metrics considered by Business Analysts.
- Velocity
- Sprint Burn-down matrix
- Cumulative flow diagrams
- Time coverage
- Defect removal awareness
- Defect resolution time
- Business value delivered
- Priority of the work
- Work category allocation
5. What is meant by Benchmarking?
Answer: The process of measuring the quality of products, programs, rules, policies, and other attributes of a company compared to the standard measures set for those properties or the other similar companies is benchmarking in business analysis.
Agile Business Analyst Salary
Since the role of a Business Analyst in Agile projects is emerging recently, there aren’t enough statistics to account for the average salary of an Agile Business Analyst in many countries.
According to Glassdoor, the average salary of an Agile Business Analyst in the United States is US$81305 p.a., whereas the average salary in the United Kingdom is around £52,067. The average salary in Canada is CA$70783 and the salary in Australia lies between AU$110k and AU$130k.
Conclusion
By achieving the prospect of an Agile Business Analyst, you’ll become an expert in Agile methodology and know how it intersects and interacts with the business analysis. Your skills and knowledge in the analysis work will be enhanced.
Looking for a career as an Agile and Business Analyst? Get straight away to our Intellipaat website to enroll in Agile-based courses and become an expert in this field.