Statistics: (1307 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Categories: Agile Methods

Agile software developers, just like traditional software developers, perform analysis activities. Unlike traditional developers, agilists approach analysis in a highly collaborative manner and do so on a just-in-time (JIT) basis. Analysis is so important to us we do it every single day. In this article, I discuss:

• What is analysis?
• Rethinking the role of analysts
• What is agile analysis?
• Analysis through the agile lifecycle
• Potential analysis models
• Conclusion

What is Analysis?

The purpose of analysis is to understand what will be built, why it should be built, how much it will likely cost to build (estimation), and in what order it should be built (prioritization). This is similar to requirements elicitation, the purpose of which is to determine what your users want to have built. The main difference is that the focus of requirements gathering is on understanding your users and their potential usage of the system, whereas the focus of analysis shifts to understanding the system itself and exploring the details of the problem domain. Another way to look at analysis is that it represents the middle ground between requirements and design, the process by which your mindset shifts from what needs to be built to how it will be built.

I begin this article by arguing that the role of analysts on software development projects needs to evolve. A discussion of what I believe “agile analysis” is follows, and finally I suggest modeling artifacts appropriate to agile analysis efforts.

Author: Scott W. Ambler