the good shepherd - the role of bas in agile

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Eerrk!

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The Good ShepherdWhat 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 ManifestoWe 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 toolsWorking software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiationResponding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items onthe 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.

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Eerrk!

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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

Product Owner

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

Knowled

ge

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

Single Chief Product/Portfolio OwnerMultiple Tactical Product Owners

• Tactical product ownership shifts depending on current focus

• Prioritizes features/projects across the portfolio as a team


PO Team

Single Chief Product/Portfolio OwnerMultiple Tactical Product OwnersMultiple 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

AnnuallyExec Management, Stakeholders

Bi-‐annuallyProduct Owners, UX, Engineering, Architecture

QuarterlyProduct Owners, UX, Architecture, Analytics, SEO, Production

Bi-‐weeklyProduct Owners, Delivery Team

DailyProduct 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

Stak

ehol

ders


Release Planning

Externally-facing


Release Planning (quarterly) - create a map of all active and planned projects for the foreseeable future



• Prioritization and release/product roadmap definition

...Stak

ehol

ders


Sprint Planning

Internally-facingExternally-facing


Release Planning (quarterly) - create a map of all active and planned projects for the foreseeable future



• Prioritization and release/product roadmap definition

Authority

KnowledgeAvailability

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

Stak

ehol

ders

POs


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

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-traditionalhttp://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 ValidationFeature usage in

enterprise software

45%

19%

16%

13%

7%

NeverRarelySometimesOftenAlways

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 Report2013-State-of-Scrum-Report_062713_final.pdf


thank you

[email protected] 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

Business

foreseeable futurerelease planning

ba play

development progressescapture

facingportfolio planning

product owner

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development team

web application