Business Analyst acting as a bridge between technical team and stakeholder in Agile Development

The preference of Stakeholders in current scenarios is they prefer products development through Agile methodology in order to meet the changing requirements in development phase of the project. Currently organizations are preferring to the solutions that meets business needs. Through Agile development is done in small iterations and continuous improvement is done in developed product by collecting the stakeholders feedback on regular basis. For understanding and gathering the requirements of the users the business analyst acts as a bridge between the stakeholders and the technical team and is also responsible to record the needs of stakeholders and clarifies any doubts to make sure the requirements are clearly understood by the development team and nothing is overlooked during the development process. The Business Analyst works closely with business users, developers, and testers to ensure that the final product meets business needs and is delivered as expected. For clarification of any business requirements with stakeholders the Business Analyst schedules meetings and also coordinates with stakeholders for user stories where the user requirements are described along with its acceptance criteria. An important responsibility of a Business Analyst is to study the current business process, identify the areas that need improvement, and understand how the proposed solution can address the existing business problems. Example of my current JFL Audit Checklist Enhancement V1 project is The auditors currently performs the store audit and records the observations and critical findings in the audit checklist also for tracking the store performance the auditors have to download previous audit store report and it is time taking process to compare the findings to track repeated observations. The solution to the business problem is provided by the business analyst of displaying the previous audit observations next to the current audit observations by implying the solution the time and manual efforts done by the business users will be reduced and it ensures that the current audit process will become easier for the auditors for tracking the actual store performance. The Business Analyst gathers the business requirements by using elicitation techniques which helps the business analyst for identifying the problems, and for identifying the actual business needs. During product development using Agile Methodology the stakeholders provide their requirements through user stories where stakeholders requirements are described in detailed. The product backlog contains all the user requirements which contains all the stakeholders requirements along with the required improvements. For ensuring that the user requirements are clear and well understood and at the time of final release of developed functionality in the development environment the business analyst works closely both with the dev team and the testing team. The testing team checks the developed functionality using positive and negative test scenarios to verify that it works correctly under different conditions. To support requirements clarification a Business Analyst contributes in Scrum meetings such as Sprint Planning Meetings -In this meeting the project team prioritizes the user stories from product backlog based on the Business Value & complexity points and the development team selects the user stories to start working on for the upcoming sprint. Here the user stories along with their Acceptance Criteria are clarified. Daily Scrum Meeting - In this meeting the Scrum Master plays an important role in tracking the scrum team performance and for tracking the projects progress. The Scrum Master asks 3 questions in the daily stand-up meeting to the project team-On what tasks have you worked on yesterday, on what tasks will you be working today and if there are any obstacles that are blocking the progress of the project. In case of any confusion the clarification on user requirements is provided by the business analyst accordingly. The stakeholders feedback is collected on developed user stories in Sprint Review meeting by the business analyst and the working functionality of that user stories is also discussed. Sprint Retrospective meeting -Here the discussion is done with project team on what went well and the ideas for improvements in upcoming projects are discussed. Business Analyst also supports in documenting the Change Requests and clarifying them. Firstly, the new requirements are analyzed by the business analyst and its impact is understood on the ongoing project post approval the Business Analyst communicates it to the project team. The Business Analyst also participates in the final User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to verify that the developed solution meets users' needs and expectations.