Agile methodologies lack an explicit Business Analyst role.

The earlier thought was that since the BAs are primarily focussed with documentation, and agile has minimum documentation there was no need for an explicit BA.

If a BA acts as a scribe and all he/she does is take requirements from the business team and pass it on to the technical team then the BA is not providing any value to the team.

However, this is not the case in the real world. Business Analysts do much more than documentation. Analysis is not just documentation.

(Please read about the Roles in Agile Methodology before proceeding with the article.)

BA as a Team Member 

As a team member, they perform typical business analyst activities like:

• Elaborating user stories:
  • They ensure there are sufficient details for the team to develop the story.
• Story-splitting
  • They recognize when a large story can be split into smaller ones.
• Defining acceptance criteria
  • They make sure when a story can be considered complete.
• Defining test scenarios
  • They make sure when a story can be considered done.
• Managing dependencies 
  • They maintain the relationships between user-stories
• Guiding Prioritization
  • They make sure the focus is always on the highest business value user stories.

The most important direct value that a BA provides to the team is that they make sure the team has a clear understanding of the work and they are not being blocked by uncertain requirements or priorities.

Possible challenges in this role:

BA should not fall back in the mode of requirement gathering by over-focusing on documentation.

He/She should constantly provide value by being a helpful resource to the team.

BA as a Product Owner Assistant

• The BA assists the product owner by doing all activities mentioned earlier i.e. Elaborating user stories, writing acceptance criteria, etc.
• The Product Owner (PO) owns all the requirements, prioritizes them and ensures the team is informed enough to develop the right features.
• The PO may not have the knowledge/skill/time to do the work and the BA assists or guides the PO to achieve their goal.
• In this capacity, the BA is still a part of the team but has additional responsibility of empowering the PO.