Elevating the Role of the Business Analyst
by David Heidt
This article is the first in a series discussing how progressive organizations are moving away from today’s traditional requirements approaches to a business specification-centric approach.
Over the last several years the business analyst role has garnered increased recognition within the marketplace. The push towards business agility, increased compliance and regulatory requirements, exorbitantly high IT costs, outsourcing and new technology enablers are the drivers behind organizations taking a closer look at their business analysis competency.
This recent surge of marketplace activity around business analysis methods, techniques, training, bodies of knowledge and professional certifications are all part of this wave of interest.
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| Elevating_the_Role_of_the_Business_Analyst.pdf | 67.71 KB |
Executable specifications over documentation
I don't want to claim that this is easy, but the agile community prefers in the form of customer acceptance tests (for requirements) over documented specs because the tests actually provide real value to the development team. Because they provide value, having a regression test suite enables development teams to evolve their systems safely, there is significantly greater chance that they'll be kept in sync with the design (hopefully also captured as tests) and code.
With specification documents there is much less motivation to keep things in sync. Worse yet, the more detailed the documentation spec the more effort it is to keep it up to date and the motivation drops further. Travel as light as you possibly can.
- Scott