I’m a business analyst, and I see a lot of adverts for agile BAs, what defines their role?

(Radtac) When we’re talking about an agile team, it’s a feature team that’s got all the skills in that team to be able to deliver a particular project or product.

Over the last 15 years or so there has been a demarcation of roles. There were analyst programmers who did analysis, design, programming, the testing and released it to live, and did the post-live support before it was handed to operations.

Those roles have become more separated, so we see the emergence of BAs, UX people, architects, developers now that don’t test, testers, etc... In an agile team, you still need all those skills. If you’re creating a new product, you still need some analysis, design, some software development, testing and some mechanism to release it to live.

Your role in an agile team is the same as it is now, Business Analyst (BA). However in the agile world we implement ‘Specialised Generalists’. The BA role is a specialist role, we enable the BA to learn other skills (testing coding etc.) so they can become more generalist and more flexible as a resource.