Driving Continuous Delivery through the lens of a Business Analyst By Melicia Grant, PMP To date, so much has been talked about in the development and deployment space that one might think that the business analysis counterpart has been somewhat overshadowed. It is not doom and gloom for business analysts in organizations that are going through the digital transformation. Like other roles being metamorphosed, the business analysts must realise that the role is being transmuted in such a way that the principles of agile and DevOps be applied in their day-to-day working environment. The notion of operating in a continuous delivery fashion should never be viewed as daunting if we practice a few principles I will suggest in this article. The conventional …show more content…
Jenny Wong’s call for action in her article titled, ‘Continuous Delivery Cannot Succeed Without Business Analysts’, postulated that as business analysts, we need to necessitate an approach that has a much shorter feedback cycle that will leave us with less guesswork, and lower cost to adapt. The scope of your features should include measures that will tell you sooner whether you are on the right track, and how you should go about validating the assumptions you have made about the rest of the feature roadmap. You could view your epics and stories as a set of assumptions that will need to be validated; each time you do that, you are learning more about what success means to your product, incrementally moving towards the path of building the right …show more content…
The aftermath of the disruptive and creative period have forced organization that have yet adopted agile and lean practices to begin experimenting with those practices. Currently, there are more pressure in the market to “be agile” and provide what customers perceive as faster and better delivery. Unfortunately, many organizations will continue to struggle with agile implementations since adopting some of the practices without the needed shift in mindset only results in failure and unmet expectations. Furthermore, many organizations will also struggle to understand where the business analysts fits in an agile environment. This leads to the second principle that should be followed; thinking beyond the working software. If we stop to ponder on the criticality of a feature's success. We would have observed that this goes beyond building working software and testing it when it is in use. It moves our mindset from "How do I write the best requirement on a project?" to "How can the best feature achieve a specific business value?” Both may sound similar, and seemingly marching towards the same goal, but it is not the case. It shifts the focus from the writing part, the mindset of perfecting how you convey your needs and wants, to whether you have met the goal