Advance Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
Reader Question: “On my current project, I am getting my first exposure to User Stories. (As a..I want..So that.) With so many stories, I am wondering about managing them so that future analysts will a body of documentation to reference. Right now, we have no structure, so the list of stories grows with no real [...]
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In my previous article I described my first ever agile project as a Java developer. I highlighted some of the challenges that we faced in terms of the requirements gathering and analysis work. In this article I’m going to talk about my first agile project as a business analyst, and how I took on some [...]
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The relationship between Business Analysts and Project Managers is often described as being built on a foundation of “healthy tension”. There is an assumption that PMs focus on project delivery, deadlines and resources – and it will often be considered desirable for a PM to challenge analysis estimates and cut schedules. One concept that links [...]
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In this previous article I started to answer an excellent question posed by John Davis: Short of hiring a company such as IAG, how can we as BAs best help our organisation – or a client organisation for those of us in IT Services – develop more maturity in requirements definition and management? In that [...]
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If you’ve been a BA for any period of time, I’m sure you’ve heard this complaint. Requirements take too long. Why don’t we just start coding? I’ve worked in several informal environments where the business analysts are in a constant fight to earn a bit of respect for the process and the analysis that goes [...]
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When I first started working on an agile team, one of the habits I needed to develop was grooming the product backlog. In an agile environment my week-to-week and day-to-day focus quickly became more integrated with what the development team was working on each sprint. If I went into a sprint planning session without a [...]
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John Simpson is director of customer outreach and marketing at Jama Software. John is a contributor for Business Analyst Times. At Jama, he represents the voice of the customer in their product strategy and communications. He has over 14 years experience working at software technology companies including Microsoft, WebTrends and Omniture. In his spare time, [...]
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In my recent post on requirements templates, I found that many of you fall into two very different camps. While some of you have formalized processes and sets of documentation requirements for your software projects (this can be helpful or hurtful), others have nothing. Those of you in the latter category feel you need to [...]
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At last week’s SQuAD conference, Danny Faught spoke about Tearing down the Ivory Tower of Testing. As I understood it, the Ivory Tower is a box that you create around yourself or your department that essentially says, “I can’t work effectively unless….”. In response to false expectations and a fear of failing, we create processes, [...]
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I’ve begun to question the whiz bang method with which most new IT strategies are laid out. Surely, we’ve spent time understanding the business needs and developing an ideal future architecture, but when it comes time to communicate this with the business team (who needs to buy-in and possibly fund it) and the technology team [...]
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3 posts
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