Interviewer:
Where does a business analyst fit on a scrum team?
Mr. Agile®:
There is no role called business analyst on a scrum team. There’s a product owner, a scrum master and the development team itself. Now having said that, what was the job of the business analyst? The job of the business analyst was really to take business requirements and make sure that they were clear to a development team. What is the job of a product owner? The job of a product owner is to take business requirements and make sure that they’re clear to a development team. So, if you have a pool of business analysts that your organization can empower to own the product — to really make those tough business prioritization decisions, fantastic! What we’ll do is we’ll take the business analyst and move them into that product owner role, because we are desperate for good product owners.
If your organization is not willing to truly empower them to make those tough business prioritization decisions, we don’t want them becoming a “proxy product owner” and separating the product owner role or doing any of those other things. We’re actually going to have to find something else for them to do within the scrum framework, because the days in which a business analyst would build out these bloated documents (that, honestly, people weren’t reading anyways) are done. We’re not going to do them under an agile approach.
