Who is Business Analyst?

The role of Business Analyst is to capture and document all the requirements in order to make sure that those requirements would be delivered by the IT team. It is a complex task and requires an in depth understanding of the business and the customers too. It would be the ability of a BA to analyze and think in the perspective of different stakeholders.

Role of a BA in scrum?

A Business Analyst would play an important role in SCRUM. This person would be the link between the product owner and the technical IT team.

Responsibilities of BA

There are many roles for a Business Analyst in Scrum and there would be certain responsibilities to which a BA should stick to -

• Grooming the product backlog depending on the prioritization provided by the product owner.
• Customer Requirements are analyzed, and every requirement would be understood in customer's perspective.
• Every Requirement would be understood in Business perspective.
• Creating requirements in the form of User stories with appropriate Acceptance Criteria.
• If the User stories are already created by the product owner, then they should be reviewed to make sure that all the Business Requirements are covered, and Acceptance Criteria would meet the user story functionality.
• Working with the stakeholders and product owners to understand the scope and suggest any improvements to the requirements.
• Preparation of the design flow documents when needed.
• Business Analyst would be an important person in Brain storming sessions when the team meets to discuss on the upcoming sprint's backlog.
• BA would guide the team, help in understanding the requirements and must approve the implementation as well.
• BA also would work closely with the Quality Analysts to analyze the test coverage, converting real world use cases into test cases, providing in depth knowledge to the team members in order to test complex functionalities.
• BA would participate in the planning meeting in order to help the team in preparing estimations by helping them understand the flow, complexity, and dependency.

Business Analyst as a Product Owner

Based on the company and the customer, it would sometimes be that the Business Analyst would be the Product Owner. In such situations, the BA would the point of contact for all the queries. Then, the BA would become the mediator between the team and stakeholders.

The BA will have to understand the requirements of the stakeholders, their ideas of improving Business and in what way the Business should grow. Based on the requirements of the stakeholders, the BA should prepare the documents, user stories, prioritize them, guide the team in understanding them and answer the queries about the same.

Business Analyst as a Team member

Having Business Analyst as a team member would be a best option because the product owner would not be available every time. If the Business Analyst is a team member, then it would be helpful for the peers in backlog grooming.

If a Business Analyst is a team member, it would be more beneficial because the technical team would find it easy and comfortable to communicate with the BA for any kind of clarifications. BA would work closely with the QA team for testing such as Analyzing the coverage, the use cases covered, any requirements that are hidden.

In few cases, the Acceptance criteria would be so complex and unclear. So, then as a team member it would become the responsibility of the BA to write a clearly explained Acceptance criteria.