Agile Business Analyst’s Typical Workday:

• Participate in daily scrum
• Assist the team
• Assist the Product Owner
• Manage products backlog and the story map
• Regular BA tasks

An Agile BA has to participate in the daily scrum meeting

In this meeting:

• Each team member informs what they did yesterday, what they will do today and if there are any impediments.
• Scrum Master pays attention to obstacles to help his team overcome them.

As a BA you have to do both what the team does and also what the scrum master does.

You have to carefully listen during the meeting and keep an eye out for any requirement-related impediments of other team members. You have to assist and solve the team’s obstacles ASAP and also proactively gauge if the work is moving forward smoothly and there are not any possible impediments.

An agile BA has  to assist the Product Owner

The important tasks include:

Providing feedback on the project status:

• How is the team doing?
• Do they understand the mission?
• Are they facing any major problem?

Providing input on product needs

• Are there any gaps in the roadmap?
• Are any customer groups being overlooked?
• Are we building the right product? i.e.  Ensure the customer needs are truly being met by the product the team develops

Creating reports (if any)

• Creating KPI charts
• Updating dashboards

Agile BA has to Manage the Product Backlog and Story Map

This is the most important and most time-consuming category or work.

Product Owners are very busy people and so as you become proficient with the product the product-owner may provide high-level details and you may have to do all the heavy lifting.

You typical work in this category will include:

• Writing User Stories
• Writing acceptance criteria
• Story-splitting
• Prioritizing stories
• Analyzing gaps
• Helping the team understand everything

Eg: Helping the programmer understand the UI they are developing. Helping the tester understand the acceptance criteria.

Regardless of the methodology, there is a common set of work that a BA has to do like:

• Research
• Interviewing stakeholders and customers
• Clarifying stakeholder needs (analysis)
• Creating visual models
• Providing feedback to developers and testers
• Other administrative work

So clearly a BA is a busy person and a very useful resource in an Agile team.